It's pretty easy for one to be fired. However, there are times when I've been saddled with co-workers where the firing seemed to drag on forever. No matter how it happens, I always enjoy an exit with drama. If you gotta go, you might as well leave a lasting impression.
I've been dumbfounded by the ways I've seen people fired. For instance, if you're going to steal, try not to do it directly in front of cameras. And if you're going to show up drunk, take a breath mint first. But if you do get fired, please make it entertaining. Unless of course it's sad and a proper situation. But nobody gets fired in record time for sad reasons.
Redditoru/njaanawanted to hear about the staff members who left an impression on their way out the door, by asking:
What is the fastest you have ever seen a new co-worker get fired?
I remember a bartender I worked with who got fired for a really crappy reason, like one customer complaint. Honestly the higher ups were not thrilled with him. When they told hm, honey... he threw a small table. BRILLIANT!!
Dimes
toys r us 90s GIFGiphy"When I worked at Babies 'R Us many years ago, a fine young lad wrote on the break room white board, "Forget you witches, hire dimes." For some reason it escaped him that there are cameras pretty much everywhere. Done after maybe three days on the job."
3 Hours
"Many years ago we hired a line cook that had a decent amount of experience. He started on steak night. First steak, undercooked. Refire, undercooked. Third try, undercooked, Fourth try, cow was still mooing when it came off the grill. FOH manager goes to head chef, tells him to kick him off the line, so he does. His new job was to replace me on the sauté station."
"First order he gets is for a side of asparagus, so he puts the asparagus into the hot pan, and adds enough oil to deep fry them. Well, he goes to turn them, oil escapes, hits the fire, and started a fire. He went to grab water, and if not for my head chef stealing the cup, we might have had a bigger fire. Just like that, gone. Turns out all his previous jobs were not real places, but his supervisors were just friends who lied. Total time of employment: three hours."
Out by 11...
"I was intern at a startup out of college along with three other interns. One guy was set up at a computer kinda out of the way and apparently that was the greenlight he needed to look up some porn. Anyone who's ever been an intern will tell you that someone is usually coming over to ask you for something or if you need help and sure enough, the dude was caught looking at porn by our boss. He was walked out around 11 AM so he managed a solid two hours of porno before getting caught."
90 Minutes
"New guy, hired as quality control inspector after a lot of vetting. Job site was aluminum extrusions factory - lots of hot, sharp, and heavy things that can crush your hands and slice you up, not to mention all the moving parts. Shows up first day on the job reeking of beer. "I was just celebrating my new job with my friends before work!" Refused the booze blow test at a nearby hospital. Paperwork completed and fired after 90 minutes by the supervisor and HR."
Rude
rude kim kardashian GIF by RealityTVGIFsGiphy"It was a family owned business and she said something insensitive about the owner's recently deceased daughter."
Yeah, you have to be careful who you're talking smack around. That is lesson number one, especially if you're not solid in the lay of the land. And restaurants are always on a rolling employment. Let's continue.
Crazy
Angry Stanley Kubrick GIFGiphy"It was his second week. The guy came to work drunk af, picked the emergency axe and trashed the place with it. He got instantly fired and processed in court shortly after."
- Bonguri
Thief
"I worked in maintenance at a beach resort. One of the housekeepers managed to get her delinquent son a job as a "runner"... someone who would collect the dirty laundry after the housekeepers stripped the beds. She was actually worried when he started working because I guess he had a bad track record with other jobs. About three days after he started working, his mother confronted him about his new expensive-looking athletic shoes and a gold chain around his neck."
"He just shot back something about having a job now which didn't make sense because he hadn't even been paid yet. Anyway, about the same time there were a couple of reports at the front desk by guests who were missing large sums of money. A police report was made and people were questioned. So after only about four days this kid was fired and went to jail for stealing from guest rooms."
Out the Door...
"New person joins company. On her first morning she wrote an email to her manager how grateful she was to be with the company, how she looked forward to working for us, and on and on. She also wrote an email to her friend about how she'd got a cushy gig and would scam them for as much training as possible for the first couple of months and then leave. Apart from the general lack of wisdom of saying this on the company email system, when writing such contradictory emails it is vitally important to put the right addressee on the right email. Walked out the door after 2.5 hrs."
- pmc666
At Baggage Claim
"We had a guy start in London on a Monday as large contingent left for a a conference in Seattle later that week. I met him at Heathrow with his badge and laptop on his first morning and boarded the flight with him. Longish story, but he ended up slapping a member of the flight crew because she wouldn't let him sit in business class. I called HR when we landed and fired him in baggage claim. We paid for him to fly back to the UK next day."
Awkward...
Jesse Pinkman Reaction GIF by Breaking BadGiphySex the bosses daughters - yes daughters - the night he was hired. The real twist is that one of those daughters is now his wife and his former boss, his mother in law. So I guess he got the last laugh, and a lot of awkward family dinners."
"You mean don't do this?"
"I used to train new hires at a warehouse. We have a floor for robots to zoom around on, full of merchandise and cold spite. Only certified technicians may set foot on that floor. The rest of us? Instant termination if we do it. We stress this frequently throughout orientation."
"I'm training a group of new hires at a work station. It's their first night. Not even lunch yet. One of our managers comes over to introduce himself. One guy, who has already been copping an attitude, asks him about stepping on the floor. Manager reiterates what we all told everyone: Do it, and you're fired."
"Guy: "You mean don't do this?" (puts one foot on the floor)"
"And away he goes. I heard the rest of the new trainees laughing over how stupid he was. He was even whining about it the whole time his termination was being processed. I'm just glad I didn't get stuck training that snotty, dimwitted little pain in the @ss for two days."
People Explain Which Expensive Purchases Paid For Itself In The Long Run | George Takei’s Oh Myyy
Call Center Crazy
"A number of years back I worked at an inbound call center that also had an upsell side to it. A new guy fresh out of training was bragging about how he did over 10 x the monthly goal in his first week alone. Didn't see him the following week and heard he was laid off because he was upgrading everyone's plans who called in to the highest costing plan without their consent or informing them. About a week or two later I got a text from him asking if I could be his reference for a new call center job he got. He somehow got a hold of a bunch of our numbers and just spammed everyone asking for a reference."
BLIIIITZED!!
"Hired my roommate to work at a gas station I was assistant manager for. Shows up 2 hours late to replace me, and I could have gotten drunk from his breath. He went out after his construction job and got bliiiiitzed. Was mad at me for firing him. 16 hour shift that day and he treated me like trash till we moved. Is zero minutes a duration? LOL"
- crumps2
How Fluid...
True Stories Omg GIFGiphy"I saw this guy in interview with our boss, he was hired for 3 minutes then he peed in his desk for no reason."
Wrong Email
"Our CEO rarely sent all-company messages unless there was great news or some major event/holiday/emergency etc. One day he sends an email reminding everyone something about an extra day off everyone earned hitting a major deadline and how and when to use it."
"New woman in accounting - looked like a nice 50 something Dallas church lady, hits the reply-all and writes "I suppose we all should bow down to Mr. Generosity for the measly day off." Meanwhile she never worked on the project or was affected by long hours."
"When she realized what she did, the other finance people in her area heard a gasp come from her desk and without saying a word to anyone, she picked up her purse, took a box, added her personal items, and walked out the door to her car never to be seen again."
Talk to the Hand
"15 minutes. Working at the wharfs where we had to unload shipping containers with forklifts; new bloke starts work who claims to be a wiz at operating forklifts. First container and he drives in too fast while another worker is opening the container door. I'm not the foreman but I have a go at him about him and tell him to pull his head in. He walks off the job muttering under his breath 'Nobody talks to me like that'."
Like a Zombie
"Call centre worker, new beginner came in hungover as crap on the 1st day of the job. Within 2 hours of their shift, they struggled to look at a computer for more than 10 minutes, couldn't form a coherent sentence, walked away from the desk without a word only to just full on faceplant in the floor of the office. I'm sure the actual termination took longer, but it was obvious they lost their job the moment they walked in like a zombie."
"this job isn't for me"
"I worked at a bill collection firm in the early 90's (don't judge me). A guy started working there, went through the 2 days of training , then started working. After about an hour, he got up and left. Didn't say "I quit." Didn't say "this job isn't for me." Didn't say "forget you." He just got up to go to the bathroom, went through the front door and drove away. It took the managers a few hours to figure out that this guy got the job with a fake name, and erased his own debt on the computer."
- M_Looka
You're Out!
I Got This Credit GIF by HustlersGiphy"Briefly worked as a doorman at a strip club. Had to eject two brand new strippers for lifting wallets from the guys."
Safety First
"Guy drove a forklift into a fire hydrant, in front of a safety rep for the company. His supervisor was called over, and he immediately tells the supervisor that he won't pass a pee test, as he used his only bottle of clean pee earlier that day when he hired in. Everybody standing there immediately burst into laughter, which continued as security (also laughing) escorted him off site. Even the supervisor was all smiles... just gave him a pat on the back and wished him the best of luck. It was wild."
Oh my. People really are something else. This should be a reality show, crazy people getting fired. Now that is a mess I'd watch.
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Companies are typically in business for profit, and very few have the goal of keeping the customer's interests in mind.
But some corporations go even further to get more out of their customer in exchange for their "quality services" and as a result, the line between general business and scam becomes blurred.
Redditor jwwin asked:
"What is a predatory business that shouldn't be legal, but is?"
Students paying an exorbitant amount in tuition in order to seek higher learning should be warned there are additional expenses to cover for.
A Textbook Example
"College textbooks, they will release an 'updated' edition every semester but the information doesn't change. And then after you spent a fortune on the books the places that buy textbooks will give you like 5% of what you paid for the book."
– teethalarm
A "Double Whammy"
"Former Prof here. I talked with a book rep about this once and learned a lot. It is a bit complicated but worth understanding. Book publishers rely on large quantity sales to make any money on a book because the cost of production is so high up front (author, editors, printing, etc.). So, for a book to be profitable, it has to sell a lot of copies to spread the cost of production across all the books. A paperback in the fiction section might sell 100,000 or more. A textbook might sell as few as 1,000. So, the publisher needs everyone to buy the book to break even."
"Now add colleges into the mix. Somewhere in the 1980s (give or take), colleges saw publishers selling books and making larger profits on them than the college bookstore was making per book. So they got the bright idea to start buying used texts and reselling them. Before that, a text would come out and 97% (making the number up but it was close to that) of the students would buy the book in year one, 85% in year two, 75% in year three, 60% in year four and 50% in year five. A $50 dollar book would cost $25 to make (again, making the numbers up), sell to the bookstore for $40 ($15 publisher profit), and be sold to the student for $50 ($10 bookstore profit). Across the five years, the producer would make a profit."
"Then, college bookstores began offering students $25 for a used book and selling it for $40 ($15 profit - $5 higher than that of a new book). Students would then prefer the $40 used book over the $50 new book. But that cut the publisher's sales from 97% to 50% in the first year. Because they could not sell as many books they had to do two things: (1) raise the initial price of the text to cover the production cost in 1-2 years rather than 4-5 years, and (2) cut the cycle down from 4-5 years to 1-2 years to ensure that they got sales of the book. That is a double whammy. Texts that used to cost $50 now cost $300 or more. And they have a new version out every 18 months or so. Students refuse to pay that price and that cuts the sales numbers even further forcing the price up again. And, with new editions out so frequently, it is harder to sell them back to the bookstore."
"That's why you see so many 'course packs' now - where a professor will pick a few pages from a book to give to the students. I went from having nearly every student purchasing a text in my early career to having zero students with a text late in my career. Your professor probably dislikes the state of affairs as much as you do. I cut down what books I would select because I could not justify students paying that much for what they were getting. I would also recommend students look for older editions on Amazon and the like which got me in trouble with my administration because I was not supporting the bookstore. But, it was difficult to teach from a text that no one had or had access to. The University's desire to generate revenue from texts truly was killing the chicken because it was not producing enough eggs."
"So look for an older edition on Chegg, Amazon, or the like and match it up with what your professor is teaching from the new edition. You are right, it probably has not changed. Be careful for the problems at the end of the chapter - that is often where the changes are."
– BewnieBound
These businesses parade as services but they are notorious for taking more than what you're willing to pay for.
For A Future Owner
"Rent to Own (furniture, appliances, TVs, video game systems, etc.) The mark up on the interest over time ends up costing 4 times the purchase - or more."
– PartyAlarmed3796
"Well the trick is to not pay (seems to be what a lot of people do)."
– Expensive_Ad2695
"Which is why those places are so expensive and why they're actually kinda necessary for some people."
"They're taking a pretty big risk on people with no credit, and if a person with shi*ty credit needs a refrigerator or other necessary appliance, there's usually nobody else willing to work with them. Also, most of them report to credit agencies so you can build your credit through them."
"I'm not a fan by any means and I hate that people are buying video game systems and couches through them, but I still think they're filling a need."
– Pitiful-Pension-6535
Money Sucker
"Payday loan companies – they're like financial vampires, sucking the life out of people with high-interest rates."
– neonliolia
"And yet most of them are owned by major banks... hmmmm."
"Bank of America, Wells Fargo, US Bank, JP Morgan/Chase collectively all own the largest payday lender companies."
– Bramtyre
"In Canada, there is an effort to turn Canada Post into a kind of bank that offers basic banking services to the most vulnerable. Not sure what happened to that, but it was an alternative to check cashing and payday loan rackets."
– hobbitlover
Greedy Event Vendor
"Ticket Master."
– LTVOLT
"Agreed. We went to a preseason hockey game the other week. Tickets were $5 each but there was around $8 of Ticketmaster fees for each one and you had to use their app to get in the door because the barcodes change like every 30 seconds or something. It's ridiculous."
– darfus1895
Where can citizens turn to receive genuine care without drying up their financial resources?
Big Pharma
"Health Insurance and over priced perscription drugs."
"Wife is type 1 diabetic. Her pump is over $1000 a month WITH 50% coverage. $177 for just the sensor pack. We have the best coverage we can afford."
– Dukeboys_
"US pays the middle man for health care coverage. The middle man and the health care provider come up with "health packages" you can buy into, just in case you get sick. It's just sick how they funnel money from the middle class into this."
– dcoolidge
"Healthcare insurance industry. They can straight up reject claims you should be covered for and make you jump through near endless hoops to get them to pay for the service that is part of your plan."
– ColdHardPocketChange
All Out To Get Ya
"Homeopathic 'medicine' sellers."
"Psychics"
"Domain search engine registration scams (fake emails or physical mail that shows up saying 'your domain search registration is about to expire' and look exactly like warnings that your domain name is about to expire)"
"Fake homeowner warranty/car warranty scams loaded with so many limitations and exclusions they’ll basically never pay out."
"Multilevel marketing systems like Amway."
– 4wqrewtety
Losing Sight Of Kids' Well-Being
"From my experience working in group homes for youth are awful. The owners only want money and the more kids in care the more money."
– OddReputation3765
Going Nowhere Fast
"Car insurance."
"You get penalized for using it. Even just once in some cases."
– Effective_Sundae_839
"1000% agree. I was rear ended by a hit and run driver while i was stopped at a stop sign. Literally came to a stop for 3 seconds max and got destroyed. Car insurance wanted to give me 4k and shut me up. It’s called the nuisance fee. I eventually lawyered up and got 25k out of it. But like wtf. B*tch that’s what we PAY FOR, following renewal of my policy it increased hundreds of dollars a month and that was even after i switched to a different company. 'A claim is a claim regardless who is at fault.'”
– HitBackZach
Businesses taking advantage of their customers should be a crime, yet here we are.
What companies can you think of that legally continue to look after their own profitable interests above providing a decent service?
Just the other evening, I was walking home, and I barely survived.
I tripped on a dead tree branch.
The next thing I knew, I was flying in the air and landing on my back.
My belongings were strewn about.
And my to-go burger was dead.
A simple walk.
A simple dead branch.
And almost lights out.
Redditor Typical_XJW wanted to hear about the times people eluded death, so they asked:
"How did you almost die?"
Don't even get me started on any and every car ride.
We're always moments from the end on highways.
Back in the Day...
Hunger Games Student GIFGiphy"Almost drowned when I was 5 or 6, been hospitalized twice for sepsis between 2016 and 2019, and had a stroke this year. I'm 29."
ChristmasKid88
On the Disk
"MRSA infection in the disk on my lower spine between L5 and S1. Showed up two days after a cortisone shot but the hospital said it was from something else. Was in hospital 25 days multiple emergency surgeries."
EatA**FromBack
"I worked for a doctor who did these in-house and other procedures, and it 100% made me not trust medical facilities, cleanliness, and sterilization procedures. Had about twenty patients all come down with the same gut infection, 'coincidentally,' the same patients who came in for endoscopy procedures the same day."
dimlylit_
Saved
"Saving a younger friend from drowning, he panicked and almost took me out."
loztriforce
"Had that happen with a younger cousin when we were kids. His brother and I went to save him, he climbed on both of us and pushed us under. Lifeguard didn’t even see us until he pulled younger cousin out of the water, then we popped up gasping for air."
coffeejunki
Shucked
"16-year-old farm kid me, stepdad told me to go pick up a load of corn seed for planting. I had gone with him many times before, and driven the truck (full ton dually diesel) and hauled light stuff with it. Nobody told me how different it is to haul 10,000 lbs of seed on a big flatbed trailer on gravel. I had a lot of common sense and was driving slowly and carefully."
"Still… 10,000+ lbs pushed me down a gravel hill skidding, praying to god I stopped before the stop sign at the T intersection to a busy highway. I came to a grinding halt JUST as the front of the truck crossed the plane where the gravel turned to asphalt. A semi was coming from one direction and regular cars from the other. I shudder thinking about what if on that one. Don’t let untrained kids tow potentially deadly, heavy trailers, with zero training."
datnetcoder
Finding Tracks
College Sports Sport GIF by Sealed With A GIFGiphy"Was backwoods camping in Yellowstone and if I hadn’t considered for 30 seconds if I REALLY needed to get up and go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I would have walked out of my tent headfirst into a brown bear, which I heard before leaving and found tracks of next to my tent in the morning. Spookiest moment of my life in hindsight."
danvo5
Bears are a no go for me.
Camping is an even bigger HECK NO!!
Several Strikes
Reassuring Jimmy Fallon GIF by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy FallonGiphy"Twice. 1. Woke up to my apartment on fire."
"2. Hit head-on by a drunk driver on a small bus, just after everyone got off bus exploded."
lizard_king0000
Oh Barb
"Lmao okay, so I was getting my teeth cleaned, and I got nitrous oxide because I have so many exposed roots. Well, my hygienist at the time was this lovely lady from Minnesota. Kinda flaky, but super sweet, and talked about her family all the time. So I'm in the chair and she hooks up my mask, and away we go. I actually fell asleep! Except not so much."
"Turns out Barb had forgotten to turn the oxygen on and had been feeding me straight nitrous. She only noticed because I started gasping for air while unconscious. So that's how I almost died at the dentist. I never saw Barb again, but I tell you, that was the best nap of my life!"
CharismaticAlbino
Climb Up
"I was snorkeling. I had my other stuff stored on a rock by the water, about 3 meters high. When I got out, I decided to climb straight up. Almost at the top, the rock I was hoisting myself up on came off and I fell back first onto the coral. If a friendly wave hadn’t come in, I would have broken my back, at least."
Yugan-Dali
Blood Loss
"I was diagnosed with a rare fatal blood disorder from birth, doctors projected I’d live till about 6 and then die from massive blood loss. As this was the mid-90s, they tested the idea of using stem cells from my sibling's umbilical cord; administering the first successful stem cell transplant from a sibling donor and I’m still here to tell the tale!"
Material_Cry1697
These were some tremendously close calls.
Do you have any near-death experiences to share? Let us know in the comment below.