What’s the craziest or most outrageous (maybe even NSFW) incident that led to someone being fired from your workplace?
What’s the craziest or most outrageous (maybe even NSFW) incident that led to someone being fired from your workplace?
I used to unload trucks in an absolute madhouse.
The heat in the back of the transparent roofed trailers in summer was a nightmare so some of the lads would strip down to their boxers then pop their boots and high vis back on. We eventually got cameras installed pointing down the trailers and we're suddenly required to be fully clothed at all times. Our shift lead took particular offense to this and flashed his cock at the camera whilst shouting obscenities. He didn't come back to work the next day.
We had 4 guys sacked for not only opening customers parcels but for taking fireworks out of said parcel and taping them to Frisbees which they then threw to each other. One inevitably went off in one fella's hand. He eventually managed to sue for unfair dismissal somehow.
Another guy was caught trying to sneak a slab of wine out to his car.
Not my workplace exactly, but I used to hang out with this Kiwi who worked as a foreign English teacher in Korea in the same small Korean city as me. The foreigner community was fairly close-knit because there was only 50ish of us.
We all knew him. Everyone liked him. Fun guy. A little weird sometimes. He never told anyone his last name. The end of his pinkie finger was missing and if you asked him about it, he always said a shark bit it off.
One vacation about two years into his tenure, he decided to take a trip to Las Vegas. He never came back. I'm not 100% on the details past this point, but what I heard was they stopped him from entering the US because he was wanted in New Zealand on 37 counts of distributing child pornography. He was basically extradited back there and as far as I know went to prison. His trail disappears there.
This is one of my favorite stories. I only observed the events or was told firsthand by those involved. This is a true story.
Working in a crappy thrift store chain. Coworkers are cool as shit though. Befriend all the ones remotely close to my age. Customers are still terrible though. Especially the ones with the shitty kids that just terrorize the store while they absent-mindedly browse and shop.
One day this little shit is just running around the store and just making extra work for everybody for no good reason. Opening sealed bags of random toys. Etc.
After finally having enough of his bullshit, a coworker friend goes over to the kid and tells him, very sternly, he needs to go back to his mom. Little shit runs back and complains to his mom whom happens to be a total bitch; like when I hear the term "Karen" being used, she's a textbook example of one.
Karen escalates, fast forward to outside the managers office, there stands Karen, my Friend, Manager and Little Shit.
While Karen is bitching to the Manager about how "Friend can't talk to her kid like that" & "he's not his father," etc. The Little Shit looks at Friend and with a taunting edge stated: "You're gonna get fired!" Without missing a beat Friend looks Little Shit in the eye and replies with a simple Fuck You. A 34 year old man saying that to some 10 year old brat? Hilarious. Everybody just fell silent with their jaw on the ground. Karen, Manager and Little Shit all silent for a moment. The rage building in Karen was written all across her face though. When she could finally utter words Manager started with "Friend, go home." "Okay!" He left with a great big smile on his face... he did get fired because of that though. He said it was worth it.
Coworker found him on the sex offender registry for messages with some woman trying to arrange a sexual meetup with her daughter. Not even a statutory teenager situation, an actual child. Apparently he had some connections with law enforcement which kept him out of jail.
Everyone already hated him for general creepiness and being terrible at his job, so there was a degree of vindication in confirming how horrible of a person he was. Still super fucked up.
This got me into a way bigger rabbit hole than I remembered... The person is not officially "fired" since you cannot fire a tenured, distinguished professor and a former department head, but I suspect she was persuaded to leave. The incident is quite wild, I was just a random undergrad hired to do lab tests so I only knew some details.
This is about Dr. Connie Weaver, professor emeritus and former department head at Purdue's Department of Nutrition Sciences (her ORCiD). She was known for nutrition research where the institution recruits adolescents summer-camp style (similar to a clinical trial), and in 2017 she started to lead a multi-year (lasted one month before it was shut down) study on low-sodium diets in adolescents, Camp DASH. Supposed to be a gold-standard diet study... close to 10 million dollars of NIH money on the line too.
And then things went off the rail. The operation tried to cut a lot of corners: pretty much all of the employees were undergraduates who couldn't find other things to do for the summer, training was minimal or nonexistent, and the employees-to-camper ratio was very, very low... oddly similar to the recent MrBeast incident where participation oversight seems to be very bad.
This then led to sexual harassment, abuse, etc... one poor girl's nude was shared online, probably more cases of sexual assault, several adolescents got into serious fights with each other, and from what I've heard some of the undergrads who were on supervisory roles were also injured. Several lawsuits were filed, the university stepped in and stopped the study (I just remembered them stop scheduling me to work in July and was wondering what went wrong lol), the issue got elevated to the university president, and more lawsuits...
Obviously tenure means someone should be protected from being terminated at-will like most employment contracts. So the reason I have my suspicion is... Dr. Weaver became a professor emeritus not long after the incident, but is now somehow still publishing work while working from... San Diego State University? Doesn't seem like someone who retired on their own will to me.
If you are interested in the full detail... here are some news articles on this incident. Exponent is Purdue's student-run newspaper
It's health care so obviously we were told that we'd have to be vaccinated against COVID or be fired, like many. Most people went along with it, but the CEO sent out a final warning email to the whole network, and this antivax dingdong somehow managed to reply all to the CEO giving him a patronizing lecture about how COVID wasn't real, how nobody had died of it, and how he had read several patient charts that proved this, and how the CEO was making a very big mistake, and how he, this clerk, knew science better than the CEO did. He was fired for reading patient charts he didn't belong in, of course. The email was super patronizing and he claimed to have an M.Sc and that meant he knew better, despite the fact he was working as a clerk, and gave all sorts of false "evidence".
Anyway he was fired and reply all to the CEO is disabled.
Sex in the stock room. Caught by manager.
Not crazy, just sad.
Middle of the day, sitting at our desks working. This middle aged guy who was usually happy as Larry gets up and leaves the office leaving his stuff behind. Not a word said. I just assumed he was getting a coffee or something.
End of the day rolls around, stuff still there. Same thing the next day. Still there the next week.
People start asking what happened to him, but the agency he was working through kept telling us he’s coming back soon.
Over a month later, someone packs up his stuff and puts it in the bin. The guy was never coming back, turns out he went left and ended his own life the day he walked out. Never made it home.
The agency apparently only found out he was dead a few weeks after the incident, then strung us along so they could find a replacement. We terminated their contract and offered the handful of other employees jobs.
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Another job, we had a new guy start. Very conventionally attractive and he seemed normal enough.
A few weeks later one of the women complained to HR that someone was stalking her. She was getting ‘flattering’ letters, emails, notes etc and they often contained information and photos in/about/around her work. Flattering, but not something she was comfortable with
Few weeks later, we’re told new guy won’t be coming back due to inappropriate behaviour.
Woman had to get a restraining order against the guy. In a twist of irony, she said that if the guy had just talked to her, she would have gone on a date with him in a heartbeat.
The bosses favorite guy at my work who got 2 promotions got arrested by the FBI for sextortion of teenagers. It was only shocking to him.
We had a new group in from another regional site come for training.
It turned out the one was actively also a prostitute. She was freely distributing her social media, showing people videos of herself, and asking us where the secluded parts of the campus were so she could do her thing with some of the scientists.
She didn't do very much actual work, or at least not what she was supposed to be doing there. I give her credit for seeming to be very proud of her side gig. She seemed to really enjoy it. I think she just eventually stopped coming in after they went back to their own site, so maybe she did find herself a scientist.
Definitely the wildest person I've ever worked with.
Dude brought a sex worker into his fiber splicing trailer and the boat was a-rockin’ when the supervisor came knockin’.
This guy in the warehouse made a deal with another guy to sell his porn collection. So he brings it in one day in a big cardboard box and leaves it sitting in the coat room with the top open, you could see X-rated stuff just walking by. Someone says something to management and the box gets confiscated, but they don't know who it belongs to so that's pretty much the end of it. Until our hero goes and files a complaint about the theft of his property.
We had an A/P manager who chewed her way through 3 entire staffs before management decided the problem was actually her. Two of them collectively quit in a group on one day! That was the most outrageous I think. How did it take FIFTEEN people quitting because of her management before they fired her?
Also one manager who came in shitface drunk and swinging when she got fired. That was the most dramatic.
Not exactly crazy but just mysterious...this was at a software company I worked at many years ago. It was one of the developers in the team adjacent to ours who I worked with occasionally - nice enough person, really friendly and helpful, everyone seemed to get on with them really well and generally seemed like a pretty competent developer. Nothing to suggest any kind of gross misconduct was happening.
Anyway, we all went off to get lunch one day and came back to an email that this person no longer worked at the company, effective immediately. Never saw them again.
No idea what went down - but the culture at that place actually became pretty toxic after a while, which led to a few people (including me) quitting - so maybe they dodged a bullet.
Dishwasher was a legit creep. Proved management inaction took almost a year to get rid of them.
Jacked 5 ft 5 black guy.
Would talk extremely close to female servers. One time parked someone in and kept asking them questions like where you live etc. Talked about his jail time openly. Would get angry and just yell in the dish pit. One time said "hey what's that other car in your driveway" to a woman.
The ex gang member who taught me to cook said he was the kind of guy who enjoyed the gay in jail. Institutionalized to a degree. Was a dish washing machine.
Hit on my boyfriend and would look down his shirt, be like look good in them jeans etc. In same month would emotionally abuse him to tears.
One time recall going up to him and saying someone was obviously not interested because she was new, visibly scared with him next to her when she was just trying to prep. People could hear him yell at me from the dining area, but after that he was different in a good way with me. Typical abuser workplace shit that thrived on inaction. Could have killed me if he wanted of course.
Bizarre man. Forget why he was finally let go but everyone breathed a little easier...
Until the woman with BPD started lol
Surprisingly this one actually didn't lead to someone being fired because the person was never found, but when I was a teenager I worked at a local retailer in Canada called Canadian Tire. The manager called everyone into the employee washrooms to show us that someone had scrawled "CT sucks" in human feces -- presumably their own -- on the inside of a toilet stall.
Mike would walk into random meetings that he didn't belong in, lay his head on the table, and knock out. Snored loud as fuck. He did this in my meetings alone at least three times a week.
He'd be found sleeping in the driver seat of his car about once a day too, clocking hours.
I saw the dude sneak up on a lot of people and assault them. Smack mens asses, rub women's shoulders, he put this catholic nerd in a chokehold and whispered "security can't help you here, n****" and then let him go.
He'd talk about how sick work from home was, how he'd just play NBA2K and Tekken all day, work on his car, sleep, and get paid.
Homie worked with us for like 3 or 4 months before he got fired. When he left, I got assigned his work. He had one ticket. It was three months old, and it was to update some software on our platform from vX to vX+1. It took me three minutes.
Dude was reading comic books at his desk the entire time he was there. He was really living the dream for a minute, I heard after he got fired that he moved from computers to car mechanic.
Guy in my department strolls into my office and says, "Welp, this is probably my last day working here." I asked him why he would say that. He sits down and shoves his phone across the desk toward me. I start reading and it's an email from him to the CEO complaining that our boss is, in so many words, a complete fucking moron.
I finished reading and was just like, "Yeah, you shouldn't have done that." I mean, he wasn't wrong. I agreed with basically everything in his email. He was also right about it being his last day working there because he was fired that afternoon.
A guy in our data center couldn't figure out who owned a particular machine that he needed to work on. So his solution to figure it out was to let them come to him. He went and pulled out the network cable and waited. He was escorted out a little while later. The moral of the story is don't go disabling production machines on purpose.
Working on a boat. We got a new shipmate who had worked there on previous seasons, most of us didn’t know him but he was good friends with another member of the crew. The day he got in the two of them spent the night catching up and getting absolutely trashed. Night ended with new guy stumbling in to the cook’s cabin and pissing right on the cook while he was sleeping. New guy was fired that morning without having worked a single day.
I've worked with a lot of good and a lot of bad surgeons, but even the bad ones aren't usually dangerous bad, but like slow af, sub-optimal but passable outcomes, shit like that.
I've worked with ONE who was just absolute shit at his job... and his incompetence got at least one patient killed.
He got axed pretty quick... hopefully his license was revoked and he got charged with murder, but I never got any details of post-firing.
A guy on my team was absolutely convinced the external monitors he had were 1080p and not 1680*1050 resolution, and that everyone else using 1680*1050 were just wrong. He got into an argument with IT service desk over HDMI cables, which he wanted to prove himself correct (since everyone else were supposedly chumps for accepting the tyranny of having to use DVI cables for their monitors, thus forcing them to use the lower resolution). The argument escalated and well, he kind of just disappeared after that and never came back.
The IT service desk folks were already touchy about their HDMI cables since people were apparently stealing them for use in the meeting rooms.
Pity, I liked him but that was kind of unhinged. Besides, the monitors’ native res was definitely 1680*1050 lol.
There was a guy who was in tech support who talked to a customer about who was hot or not in the company. It was actually the customer who started the conversation, but the rep ran with it and used all kinds of unprofessional and disparaging language when describing his female co-workers.
That call happened to have a supervisor listening in, so he was fired immediately after he got off the call. The thing is found out who called in, and the women on the team had to assist him when he called for support.
Unhinged entry level employee screaming and swearing and threatening the CFO and spit in her coffee mug.
An email went out to the whole company telling us not to let him in the building before he even got back to his desk to be fired. This is a software company, not exactly the type of place that has armed guards, but the (ex-military) information security dude set up in the area packing for a few weeks after that.
I was the manager overseeing this facility at the time. We had just hired this guy a few weeks ago and he kept coming in late by about 15-20 minutes. His supervisor came to me to talk about it and ask what we should do. I knew that he rode the train to come in so I wanted to have some leniency on him and not just kick him to the curb right off the bat.
So I told his supervisor to push back his shift by 30 minutes. That should give him enough time to make it in on time.
He accepted the new time shift. But the very first day of him starting this new schedule, he was 15 minutes late again. I wanted to have some compassion and give him another chance. For the next two days, he did the same of coming in 15-20 minutes late.
He was still on probation at this point, so we didn’t really have anything to keep him here or any con of letting him go. It seemed obvious that we had to let him go. This was my first time terminating someone.
They handed me the exit papers for him to sign and also for me to deliver the news to him so I did. While he was signing the papers, he asked me if he could have another chance. To be truthful, I thought about it in my head for a very quick millisecond but said that we couldn’t. He was pretty cool about the whole thing though. I wished him luck in his next position and he left not making much of a scene.
Bonus story and definitely more crazy; sorry, just remembered it after typing the first story.
At the same facility, there was a janitor who had been there for probably 20+ years and he did a pretty good job and was friendly.
Though one day, his supervisor and my assistant approached me to have a meeting about him about something that happened.
Apparently he had made a really inappropriate sexual comment and gesture to one of the women who also worked there, though no actual physical touch was made. I was pretty upset about it and had him suspended for the rest of the day while I tried to figure out what we should do. I knew this was something that could get out of hand and needed to get HR and my boss, the owner of the company, involved.
I remember also meeting with the woman involved and asking her how she felt I should deal with the situation. Not really asking her to make the decision, just wanted to know what she felt would be fair as the victim in the situation. She said she didn’t want to be near him anymore and I completely understood and agreed.
Quite honestly, I wanted him gone. I don’t feel we should tolerate that kind of behavior. Though, my boss didn’t agree with me that he should be terminated. I can’t remember the reason why, or if he even gave me a reason, but I felt really disgusted over it. But he did suggest we suspend him without pay for 1 full week which we did.
But I couldn’t override his decision to terminate the guy, I did my best to keep him separated from any women who worked there. Sure, boss says I can’t fire you, but I won’t allow you to victimize anyone else while you’re here. We’ll schedule you to work away from others and only in areas when they’re vacant now. Thankfully everyone rotated so it was common for areas to be vacant for periods of time that he could clean without interacting with anyone anymore.
Though, things actually got worse with him. Someone went into one of the bathrooms after he had cleaned there and found an open can of beer on the floor. His supervisor said he smelled of alcohol but when I met with him, I didn’t smell anything and denied drinking on the job. He might have cleaned up before coming to see me, but I didn’t have much proof except hearsay. We also didn’t have direct proof it was his beer on the floor. Just very coincidental suspicions. I remember going behind the building one day and I found a pile of bricks stacked up on each other like 7 bricks high. Inside of the bricks was full of crushed beer cans. This was an area only he really ventured in so I knew it had to be him. Though I couldn’t exactly prove it so nothing I could do about it at that moment.
But coincidentally, around the time this was all happening, something Trump had done recently had tightened immigration so much so that we were required to have all employees provide proof on an official government document of their legal status in the country. Whether that be a state ID, passport, or green card.
Wouldn’t you know that this same janitor was illegally in the country and couldn’t provide any documents? I don’t remember the full story, except whatever document he had was now expired and has been for some time and wasn’t exactly easy to just get renewed. I didn’t call up any agency to come take him away, but I did take full advantage of the situation to finally get him out of my building. I met with him in private and was very apologetic that it was out of our hands, that we had to let him go since he couldn’t prove his legal status in the country and the government was forcing us to not allow him to remain in employment with us :( so sowwy.
Honestly…the whole manager position was an experience and I’m glad to have had it so I can safely say I do not ever want to be a manager ever again in my life. I dealt with a lot of bullshit and was starting to feel suicidal over some of the bullshit I was dealing with. I was so glad when I had a new job lined up and the company was folding at the same time I was leaving.