{"id":61512,"date":"2023-03-14T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-03-14T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/motor-junkie.com\/?p=61512"},"modified":"2023-03-14T14:17:04","modified_gmt":"2023-03-14T18:17:04","slug":"the-stupid-mistakes-that-got-people-fired","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.motor-junkie.com\/the-stupid-mistakes-that-got-people-fired\/61512\/","title":{"rendered":"The Stupid Mistakes That Got People Fired"},"content":{"rendered":"
It is accurate to say that being fired or laid off isn’t always due to a worker’s subpar work. There are times when this occurs as a result of a company deciding to downsize, restructure, or even because of financial difficulties. However, it’s important to note that the decision to fire an employee due to “horrible” performance or wrongdoings is not always an easy one for the employer. But there are situations where the reasons for termination, such as gross misconduct or criminal activity, may be so glaring that the decision to terminate becomes obvious.<\/p>\n
These peculiar tales will highlight some of the insane scenarios in which managers or owners didn’t think twice and immediately change the employee’s status from “Hired” to “Fired”.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n A driver at the franchise I work arrives at the house he’s delivering to. He walks up to the door and sees that it’s open. Next, he peeks inside and sees the occupant of the home passed out on the couch with a $50 bill in his hand (the dude only owed about $10). So he enters the house walks up to the dude, takes the $50 and leaves the food. Also, he snap-chatted the entire thing. So basically, he trespassed on private property, robbed the resident, and recorded his crime.<\/p>\n He was terminated the next day but about 6 months later my area manager rehired his dumb*ss. Spoiler alert: he’s still a piece of sh*t.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I had an employee at a shoe store in a mall who had a few issues but the one we were working on the most, and for which she had been written up, was that her family kept coming to visit her at work. Her children would climb all over the fixtures and she and her husband would ignore them. She would always greet a customer who would walk in but then she’d go right back to talking to her husband. She didn’t attempt to sell them shoes (her job) and they wouldn’t interrupt her to ask for help. So she gets a final written warning and I try to explain to her how her actions are hurting sales, etc. We make a rule that her family can’t be in the store, but she can visit them in the mall during her 15-minute breaks. She apologizes and I think I’ve gotten through to her. But one day I’m at home and I get a call from another employee to tell me that not only is her family in the store, but they’d spread out a blanket on the sales floor and were having a picnic.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Manager at a hotel, and we had just hired a new guy for the night audit. Must’ve been his 4th or 5th night and had already done something stupid enough to get fired.<\/p>\n He was the only one there that night, and I had forgotten to tell him something or another after he relieved me from my shift so I called the hotel about an hour after I left. No answer. This shouldn’t happen because even if he left the desk there is a handheld phone we take in case someone calls. I call a few more times and still no answer. Decide to go in since I live just a few blocks away and make sure everything is okay.<\/p>\n I get there and his car is there and everything, but as I walk in the front doors there is a piece of paper taped to the front door that says “Lobby Closed for the Night”. What the? We’re not closed. Where is my dumb*ss night audit? I go to the back room and start watching the cameras to see if I see him anywhere. After 5 minutes of watching with no sign, I’m convinced he just walked off or something.<\/p>\n I decided to rewind the cameras to see what happened. Shortly after I left he made a key card, grabbed a few snacks from our snack bar (didn’t pay), made the note, and walked out of the lobby. This dude straight-up went to one of the rooms to chill around and pretend the lobby is closed.<\/p>\n I go to the room and this f*ck*ng loaf is laying in the bed, bags of chips laid around him, totally passed out. TV is still on and everything. To top it off, he actually thought it was “unfair” he was getting fired for “literally the first thing I did wrong”.<\/p>\n VeganPowerViolence<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n He stole a bunch of bananas. Seriously. It was a college dining hall. He was an employee of the dining hall and got free meals while on shift. He was not working that day, walked into the serving area, hid a bunch of bananas in his bag, and tried to pass the cashier only paying for what was on his tray. When confronted and asked if he “had forgotten anything, maybe in his bag?” He denied having anything else. Fired on the spot. The worst part, he was on a meal plan (a kind of debit system, except you, never get the money back at the end of the semester if you don’t spend it). He had plenty of money for the semester. I have no idea why he felt the need to steal bananas.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n New guy, around 20 yrs old or so, called in sick saying he thinks he had a stroke. Since he lived across the street from the store where we worked, we all then stood and watched through the store’s glass door as he packed up his truck with beach gear and drove off with his girlfriend. Fired the next day.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n Managed a long-term care facility. Got a call one night from a resident telling me that the new nighttime worker was acting weird. This was about midnight and the shift started at 11. I called my lead (there were 3 people on duty). And asked how the night was going. She told me that “yea ‘Sally’ was sick”. Hmmmm. I put on my shoes and headed in. Now having the administrator show up at almost 1 am is never a good thing so I’m pretty sure all three of them felt scared when I showed up. I took one look at ‘Sally’ leaning against the wall and asked her to come into my office. I asked her if she had been drinking. “I never drink at work” she slurred at me. I told her I had to have her blow into this tube. We had breathalyzer tubes that registered if they were over a specific level. The crystals changed from clear to dark blue if the alcohol registered over the legal limit. No surprise. Turned dark blue. I asked her again if she had been drinking. She admitted to having been drinking earlier in the evening. She and her friend had been doing shots up until about 10 pm. ” but I’m not drunk! I stopped and ate almost 2 hours ago so it’s all out of my system”. Nope. Doesn’t work that way. “Sorry Sally, but I need to let you go. Call someone to come get you”. I told her as I was filling out paperwork for the breathalyzer usage and final check request. ” Oh that’s ok I drove in”. Nope nope nope. She then asked what time she should come in tomorrow. tobusytocare<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Not me, but an acquaintance got fired from waiting tables at a fancy restaurant because he stole all the tea candles off the tables so he could use them in an occult ritual with a girl he was trying to impress.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I had an assistant manager who would short the till every single day for $3.64, it was always the same amount and we could never prove it was him… even though it clearly lined up with only his shifts. Day or night. One day he came back from lunch at Taco Bell in our parking lot, and my other assistant saw his lunch and thought to herself “that looks good!” And walked across the street on her break and ordered the same thing. Her total? $3.64! She immediately came back and told me, I pulled all the drawers and sure enough one was short that exact amount!<\/p>\n The kicker… when he was sat down by our DM to be terminated all they told him was “we know what you’ve been stealing!” And his response was “oh! You finally figured out I was stealing all those Skechers Shape-Ups?!”(for those that don’t remember… those shoes were $130 a pair!).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n Had a bit of a major meltdown while another employee was training them – claiming they were just greatly disrespected over something. I witnessed it, and all the employee did was point out a safety precaution… and nice too.<\/p>\n When I confronted him about it, he became even more aggressive – claiming that I worshipped the devil and am part of the Illuminati.<\/p>\n So yeah. had to let him go, and start flipping over desks and stuff.<\/p>\n Cops were called, and when the sirens rang out dude just bolted out the door.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Not me, but my boss.<\/p>\n Boss had to fire a lady in our office because she lost her “marbles” when someone ate her bagel from the fridge. She literally had a tantrum, like a toddler. Also, the girl who ate it, ate it by mistake. She thought it was a bagel from the office breakfast we had earlier that same morning (it was in the same packaging as the office stuff). Now, I absolutely hate it when people eat my lunch, but the girl who ate the bagel profusely apologized. Even stated she would go and buy her a new one right on the spot. But the tantrum lady couldn’t let it go. So, that ended up being her last night.<\/p>\n reddituser<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n A lady I used to work with got fired for doing this. She’d swipe to activate the gift card, charge the customer then do a switcheroo to give the customer an empty. She was smart enough to go to a different store to use the gift cards, but she was stupid enough to ask for an employee discount which required filling out a small card with her name and employee number.<\/p>\n The manager that rang her through (only managers can ring through employees) noticed her huge stack of gift cards and got suspicious so she called our store, which had been dealing with customers claiming their gift cards not working. Put 2 and 2 together, and she got fired.<\/p>\n WiFiForeheadWrinkles<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n The girl decides to start stealing some of our products from the warehouse and sell them on eBay… as brand-new, with a factory warranty. It only took a couple of weeks before we started getting calls for tech support for products with serial numbers we did not have registered as “sold” in the system. A brief investigation leads straight to her.<\/p>\n She is fired (of course), and legal action is pursued, but the sad angle to the story is that her father worked there too, and we were forced to make him stay at home with no pay until it could be determined beyond any doubt that he wasn’t involved.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n One of my employees broke into my locked office with a customer and went through the cabinet with all of the employee files. Said files contained contracts, personal info (like SSNs), and a picture of the employee in uniform for our records.<\/p>\n when I went through the footage(w\/audio) to find out why my office was unlocked. I heard him talking to the female customer about how one of our other employees was a great guy and she should totally hook up with him.<\/p>\n The reason he broke into the cabinet with all of the sensitive info was to find the employee’s pictures because the guy wasn’t on Facebook, and the female customer wanted to see what he looked like before she made a decision about f*ck*ng him.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I was assistant manager at a restaurant for a while and one of the newer bussers had called in 3 times in his first two weeks. He called in on Saturday telling me he was deathly sick and couldn’t even get out of bed.<\/p>\n Around 9 pm after the dinner rush, one of my servers ask me to go check on table 42. I turn the corner and there is the ‘sick’ busser stoned out of his mind with two buddies eating.<\/p>\n Half_Past_Five<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Fresh out of college I worked in a call center for a mutual fund company. The job wasn’t terribly hard, just placed trades all day and occasionally had to deal with a jerk here and there.<\/p>\n An older guy who sat around the corner from me was kind of sad looking and hated being there. He would put customers on mute and curse under his breath from time to time.<\/p>\n Well, one day he had an older lady call in to place a trade to cash and she wasn’t very pleasant. He hit his mute button but the phone didn’t mute, he proceeded to call her an old nasty b*tch who will die alone until she interrupted him and said “excuse me?”. To the old guy’s surprise, he asked her what she was talking about and said she was hearing things.<\/p>\n She hung up and the call got escalated; his boss pulled the call and pulled him aside. He was told to just be honest and he wouldn’t be fired. Instead of coming clean, he kept denying it and the call was played back to him. Security walked him out right from the conference room. I’ll never forget a Cesar salad sitting on his desk for the last 5 hours of the day. Rumor has it they put the salad in his box of belongings and mailed it to his home address but I like to think it’s still sitting on that desk as a reminder.<\/p>\n garythedog<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n When I managed a small local coffee shop the new girl in the break room shook her container of oxytocin and said she pops them whenever she feels anxious but it’s not a problem.<\/p>\n It became a problem when her boyfriend came storming into the shop one day and started screaming about his pill stash that went missing, and she began screaming back and threatened to take the entire bottle in front of all of the customers.<\/p>\n Yeah, see ya.<\/p>\n reddituser<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I’m the assistant manager, but I just have to let this story go. Hired a cashier to help with shifts (and give me days off). After about a week the big Boss and I noticed that our lottery tickets were off, and one was even f*cked up(crinkly, scraped, torn). So obviously she has to go through our security tapes with management to find out the problem. So a bit of back story before the next bit, the guy’s boyfriend at the time used to have my job, and back then the cameras were positioned differently. When he left, my boss had them moved to eliminate blind spots. So when big Boss and bigger boss opened up the tapes, they found this smart guy casually ‘dropping’ large stacks of lottery tickets, and then kicking them over to spots in the cashier area that USED to be blind spots. Not only did he get caught doing this, but because of the exact positioning of where he thought the blind spot was, his boyfriend was charged too. Needless to say, he was fired immediately. Oh, and every ticket stolen is counted as a Felony. Each. Ticket.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Manager at a landscaping company. We had enclosed trailers on all the trucks. Had to fire an employee who routinely pooped in bags in the back of the trailer. He kept toilet paper in the truck. This wasn’t ibs, he was an alcoholic and would have the beer sh*ts all day.<\/p>\n Wrote him up a couple of times after the coworkers complained about the poo bags. Those were the most uncomfortable meetings ever. Had to fire him as it continued and he started throwing them out in convenience store garbage cans in the middle of the summer.<\/p>\n Eatpoutineagain<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n It was the 90’s, I still had hair, and was working as an assistant manager at a Natural Wonders store in the mall (the company no longer exists, as with every retail job I’ve held). We hired high school students almost exclusively, it was a typical low-paying after-school retail mall job.<\/p>\n There was one girl who was always late, routinely failed to get the most simple task done, and sulked whenever I called her on the behavior. She switched shifts with another girl and was scheduled to work the Thursday 4 to close shift. The shift comes up and she hasn’t shown up, finally, after she’s 30 minutes late I call her at home.<\/p>\n Me: “Hi Susie, you’re late for your shift. Are you going to make it in?”<\/p>\n Her: “I really want to finish watching this episode of Jerry Springer.”<\/p>\n Me: “Okay, I hope it’s a good episode but we’re going to have to let you go.”<\/p>\n Her: “What? But?”<\/p>\n Me: “Are you comfortable with us sending your check in the mail?”<\/p>\n Her (really quiet): “Okay”<\/p>\n I’ve never actually said the phrase “you’re fired” but I have been the person who has done most of the termination of employment.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I had a kid who worked the front counter of my shop who was perhaps the densest motherf*ck*r I have ever seen. I had to speak to him several times because his default position was to stand behind the register and stare into space. Even when there were customers waiting to order.<\/p>\n One day, while opening, I asked him to go over the opening checklist and make sure everything was done.<\/p>\n I went about my business, but 5 minutes later I look over at him and he’s still staring at the checklist. He looks up at me, nods and says “Looks good to me!”<\/p>\n When I asked if he was sure everything was done, he pointed to the list and showed me where things were checked off.<\/p>\n I sat and explained to him that those check marks had been made weeks before, and didn’t mean those tasks had been completed today. I had to handhold him through the whole list.<\/p>\n Later on that day, I asked him to check on the drink cooler to make sure it was stocked. He literally leaned out from the counter, looked at the cooler, then back at me and nodded. “Looks good!”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n An employee of mine drunkenly sent d*ck pics, in the middle of the night, to my boss and multiple other associates.<\/p>\n I had to deliver the termination because she, my boss, was directly affected and I was uninvolved in the incident. When he asked why I just slid the termination document across the desk and let him read the described events as written for his HR file.<\/p>\n Even better, he was a former high school friend of mine. I had helped him interview for a lesser role many years prior.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Not the manager, but we had a young girl start at the deli counter of the Supermarket I worked. Her family was Lebanese and on the very first day the girl’s mother is just hanging around the counter watching everything. After a while, the deli manager asks if she’s okay.<\/p>\n She said that she was just there to make sure her daughter is okay. The deli manager politely tells her that she’ll be fine and she can go home, but the mother refuses. After a little while longer, the Deli manager insists that she go home because she doesn’t appreciate being watched as she does her job and interacts with the new girl. The woman still refuses.<\/p>\n The Deli manager then gives her an ultimatum – go home now or you can take your daughter with you. That was the girl’s first and last day at the supermarket.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Hired a kid that was just barely 18 years old, to be a general guest service rep at the bowling center I used to manage. Basically, wipe down tables, and return bowling balls to the settee racks. He was so nervous during the interview but still answered the (very general) questions pretty well. So, I decided to give him a chance. This young man was the definition of instant regret.<\/p>\n Skip all the WEIRD he did, in the two weeks he worked there, to reason he was fired. A rather large woman came in with her family, and he refused to believe that she was “really that big”… this kid straight up walked up to her, in front of her family, and asked her if she was wearing a “fat suit”. I wish I could make it up, but that’s just too far out there – even for me.<\/p>\n iTheAnarchist<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I used to manage a pizza chain that rhymes with Heepsa Shmut. A long day at work was coming to an end when I told a new guy to vacuum the dining area. Came back ten minutes later and heard the vacuum running but couldn’t see it or the new guy. I looked over the bar and saw the new guy vacuuming while laying down. I really wanted to give him points for creativity but he had been horrible all day so I let him go.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Worked at a pizza place. Had a new male server working on a busy night. The manager runs outside for a cig after being stuck inside for 4 hours, and then the phone rings. The new server answers and the person complains about the pizza that was delivered being cold. The new server says that he doesn’t know what to tell them and that they should just microwave it, then hangs up. The manager wasn’t really happy when they called back.<\/p>\n That guy didn’t get fired, though, and a week later we had to throw out the entire salad bar because he flipped a switch that was clearly labeled DONT TOUCH when taking it down the night before. Openers didn’t realize it the next morning, and the following night we had a salad bar at room temperature.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Many dumb things on the clock, but this happened on the guy’s day off.<\/p>\n I’m the manager of a movie theater. One of my employees came up on his day off to watch Transformers: Age of Extinction. It was premiere night, so right dead center of our lobby we had a giant standee ( those large cardboard advertisements that people take pictures in front of) of Optimus Prime on a T-Rex Dinobot holding a sword. It looked really cool actually. One of my employees must’ve thought so as well, because after he watched his movie he came into the lobby, climbed the T-Rex and tried to steal Optimus Prime’s sword. Since his sold-out theater of 500 was ending, the lobby was packed full of people standing around watching him try and fail to detach a cardboard sword. He was fired right there in under a minute. And I mean he signed his dismissal papers and a form for some of the truly bad ex-employees banning them from the theater indefinitely right there in front of hundreds of strangers and ex-coworkers. The number of people who called him a dumb*ss and mocked him was astounding.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Had an employee tell the CEO to f*ck off in an all-hands meeting with the entire company present.<\/p>\n I hired this young a**hole off of Reddit. That was my first mistake. He did well in the interviews, but as soon as he came into the office we knew something was wrong with him. He was just mean. Prickly, condescending, and would just deflate the room. Not to mention he was a sh*tty coder.<\/p>\n After a couple of months, we were all pretty sick of him. Then one day we had this company meeting where the CEO was congratulating everyone on their recent accomplishments. It was a happy occasion. He was calling people out on and they got done and giving them a high five. Then they got to this guy and put up his hand. The dude said “F*ck no!” and left him hanging.<\/p>\n Ugghhhhhhhh… the collective groan was massive. Who denies a high-five? Seriously?<\/p>\n Anyway, he was out on his *ss by Friday.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I had to fire an employee because she refused to shower\/wash her clothes. Warned her over and over and over again. Moved her away from other people. She’s trying to cover the stench of bum clothes and dead cats with enough vanilla-scented sh*t to make your eyes water.<\/p>\n I’d just talked to her, but she didn’t report directly to me, the next day walking to my office with my breakfast burritos she walked by me and I just couldn’t eat anymore and threw it out. The burrito was the last straw. It was sausage and red Chile. I’ll miss that burrito it deserved better than to have a life cut short by vanilla-scented roadkill.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I still remember the first guy I ever had to fire, and I wasn’t even that much older than him. He was some dumb*ss kid hired straight out of college.<\/p>\n A few flags during training kept telling him if he had any questions about anything, he could feel free to ask. He never asked anything.<\/p>\n Told him to help clean up a lab, but DON’T throw away that binder of notes. Told him that VERY clearly and made him repeat it. I leave for an hour, come back, and he’s thrown it away. When asked why he said it was old notes so it didn’t seem useful.<\/p>\n You little, you don’t have enough experience or authority to decide what is useful or not.<\/p>\n I made him go out to the dumpster and dive in to get it out. It turns out there was important info in there.<\/p>\n This wasn’t the last straw.<\/p>\n The last straw was asking him to test a few parts, get them cleared by QA, and take those parts directly to shipping with a CoC. 3 step direction, pretty simple right? We’d supervised him doing it before a few times and he seemed to get it.<\/p>\n He managed the first 2. Then somehow brought down the WRONG box of parts with the RIGHT certificate of conformance (HOW DOES THAT EVEN HAPPEN?) to be shipped out and we didn’t catch it until too late.<\/p>\n That was pretty bad. It was really bad. But when we asked what happened and if he made a mistake, he kept denying it. I told him there were only 2 people in the office who regularly tested those parts, and it was either him, or the other girl (who I know was meticulous as f*ck AND she wasn’t testing it for the last few weeks since I wanted him to learn how to do it). He tried to pin it on the girl.<\/p>\n Like if he’d at least been honest and apologized….I don’t know. Maybe I would’ve given him a second chance. But this f*ck*r kept denying it, saying it wasn’t him when basically everyone knew it was him. Even the guys at shipping had a record of him coming down and the girl’s weekly report had noted that she wasn’t doing testing that week.<\/p>\n A guy who can’t listen to directions, f*cks up and won’t admit it, and tries to pin his mistakes on his coworker is scum. If he’d shown any remorse or tried to improve himself at any point I wouldn’t have minded as much.<\/p>\n1. Recorded His Crime<\/h2>\n
2. Having a Picnic<\/h2>\n
3. He Thought It Was “Unfair”<\/h2>\n
4. Steal Bananas<\/h2>\n
5. Beach Gear<\/h2>\n
6. She Didn’t Remember<\/h2>\n
\n“Sally, you no longer work here. Coming to work intoxicated is not tolerated”. Oh. Really? Yes. Really. Please call someone, who has not been drinking, to come to get you.
\nShe called about 16 hours later asking me for her next week’s schedule. She didn’t remember being at work and getting fired.<\/p>\n7. Occult Ritual<\/h2>\n
8. Every Single Day<\/h2>\n
9. Major Meltdown<\/h2>\n
10. Tantrum Lady<\/h2>\n
11. Stack of Gift Cards<\/h2>\n
12. On eBay<\/h2>\n
13. A Great Guy<\/h2>\n
14. ‘Sick’ Busser<\/strong><\/h2>\n
15. Excuse Me?<\/h2>\n
16. See ya<\/h2>\n
17. Blind Spot<\/h2>\n
18. Uncomfortable Meetings<\/h2>\n
<\/h2>\n
19. Jerry Springer<\/h2>\n
20. Handhold Him<\/h2>\n
21. Let Him Read<\/h2>\n
22. The Mother Refuses<\/h2>\n
23. Instant Regret<\/h2>\n
24. Points for Creativity<\/h2>\n
25. The New Server<\/h2>\n
26. Try and Fail<\/h2>\n
27. Who Denies a High-Five?<\/h2>\n
28. I’ll Miss That Burrito<\/h2>\n
29. The Last Straw<\/h2>\n