Watched a guy with an iPad stuffed down the front of his pants walk out through a metal detector. The outline and part of the box were very visible.
Working at a call center and we had bonuses for people that could book the most hotel rooms (hotels.com). This one lady suddenly started winning all the bonuses day after day. This went on for almost 2 weeks. Then the FBI showed up. Turned out she was just stealing people’s CC numbers and booking them hotel rooms without them knowing.
Uh… That’s gotta be the lowest possible profit way to steal someone’s credit card funds. She could have just spent the money on the cards.
Let’s be honest, corporate was just mad they didn’t think of it sooner! :p
I did this briefly years ago for a hotel chain (the booking, not the stealing). We got an extra quarter for everyone we transferred to another department for deals or some shit. We were supposed to ask people if they would like to hear about it but I found out that as long as it transferred they could immediately hang up and I still got my bonus. After that every caller I had got transferred to the other department for the rest of the time I worked there.
I made an extra few hundred bucks and got canned about the same time I found a job in my field. No FBI involved, though.
I worked in a call center for an internal support team. We had a group that started early in the morning since our headquarters was on the West Coast and calls would come in really early from the East Coast offices. Every Friday we would organize a group order for breakfast from a local diner and I usually was the one who would go and pick it up (long before DoorDash). One particular morning the order was missing a side of bacon for one of the team members. This person got so angry that they didn’t have their bacon, they decided it would be a good idea to call the diner from the middle of our office while most agents were on the phone with end uses. They proceeded to yell at and lecture the poor diner worker who answered the phone saying things like “You forgot my damn bacon, I think you did it on purpose” and “What are you gonna do to fix this?” The call lasted a couple minutes as most of us were looking at one another in shock. Unsurprisingly, they did not return on Monday and we all couldn’t believe someone was fired for missing bacon.
Work in a warehouse where boxes open all the time and fall out on the floor. This supervisor found a box of spilled pens and used one of them to write something down and they fired him for stealing 😂. I think they were looking for a reason cuz he was kind of uncontrollable.
I got fired when the company decided to downsize.
“How is that dumb?” you ask? That happened less than two weeks after I was hired. The boss man’s speech indicated that that was the result of a long deliberation by corporate. So if you knew there could be layoffs any moment, why the fuck were you hiring?
Because they’re heartless.
This is usually done to keep things going as normal as possible for as long as possible. Once people start noticing something is wrong, the best people start looking elsewhere. Before you know it, not only is the company in financial trouble, but it can’t recover because some of the best people left. At least one time I witnessed, the company was working on layoff plans and even limited bankruptcy, but at the same time negotiating with the investment firm that owned part of the company to get more money. If they got the money, everything would be fine. It wasn’t till that fell through, they had to start laying people off.
As if the best people won’t leave once the layoffs start
Right but you’re trying to avoid them leaving before that in case you get a win and don’t need to make the lay-offs. If they leave earlier the win you’re hoping for may no longer be enough to save you.
Exactly. Companies are typically working on multiple conflicting scenarios because you don’t know which it’s going to be
Yup, I worked for a company that was laying off but they were still hiring because, “they had a hiring policy.” Absolutely nonsensical.
What do you think would happen if the C-suite called HR and told them “we’re about to announce a downsizing in 2 months, stop hiring people”?
I worked for a company that did just that and it was the best way to do it because a lot of people left on their own.
The problem is that this way, your best people with the most options leave first.
Those you want to keep long enough to do the re-structuring and make the numbers on the books look good, so you can sell the company before it disintegrates completely.Aren’t those people also the first to be let go? They’re the most expensive and you can maximize short term profits by letting go to expensive employees and hiring on cheap ones.
Not always. I think the best people think they WON’T be let go and some others who don’t perform, figure they are on the chopping block.
In our case it didn’t matter because they wound up having four rounds of layoffs before shutting that location down entirely. So it really wound up being WHEN you were fired, not IF.
The last time I was a team lead, I would sit in on meetings and whenever this one admin assistant was present she would complain about an analyst’s appearance saying things like he looked disheveled because his shirt had some wrinkles; but he was very much silicon-valley/california-shabby-chic fashioned for the time.
We got bought out by a bank complete with stereotypical old fashioned management and dinosaur sensibilities from the East Coast. She brought up the analyst again during one of our meetings that included the new management and the analyst was fired the next day.
Eastern and Western US work ideals clash all the time. I’m in CO and we are definitely a we work to play state not we live to work and I haven’t seen an actual suit worn by anyone other than a lawyer around here, even at church. As soon as someone from the east coast shows up it’s painfully obvious. We don’t have much tolerance for their go, go, go ways and usually show them a great time and a relaxed vibe to relax them a bit. They’re always perplexed at how we can perform so well with such a relaxed attitude. Doesn’t usually click that it’s correlated.
Also Colorado. Granted, covid didn’t give me much opportunity here but I wore a suit this summer for the first time in about 5 years. It was a wedding and I was the officiant 🙃
Oh I’m sorry, weddings and prom are still very formal, true. But a lot are western wear these days. Good point.
Oh no, I wasn’t trying to disprove your point at all! Just showing how extreme the situation needs to be to justify a suit. From what I remember most of the guests didn’t wear a suit either, but I can totally see it being a thing on the east coast.
Wait… People don’t have a work-to-live attitude in CO? I live in NC where everyone works their lives away. Are you telling me I can move, even within the US, and that’s not the case? I know NC is terrible for workers, but if it’s that much of a discrepancy then I would pack and go elsewhere asap.
First thing I got told when I moved from NoVA to CO as a manager was people work to play. That has proven true time and time again. Snows a lot, everyone calls out and hits the slopes. Gorgeous day and they’ve just recently stocked a favorite fishing spot? Calls out to fish. Hunting season and got one of the lottery elk tags? Puts vacation in or unpaid time off since they’re extremely hard to get and goes off trying to bag and elk ok the western slope. Recently upgraded your Jeep? They’re definitely taking it off road on a mountain trail stat. Yeah, we have a ton of fun out here.
colorado felt like another silicon-valley-ish niche to me so this makes sense, but i’m surprised to hear about the work perspective because the people i worked with in colorado tended to have more socially conservative views than my californian colleagues complete w an early-to-bed-early-to-rise work ethic.
the denver-boulder area, in person, is hard to distinguish from places like austin if not for the climate and geography; the general attitudes of strangers towards me made that place no different than anywhere in texas for me.
Working in IT - Desktop support. One of my co workers picked up a ticket to go replace a keyboard in HR. HR was in a different building and it was mid winter and really cold out. He grabbed his coat and walked over there to replace the keyboard. Apparently he had a fat stanky bag of weed in his coat pocket. It was apparently very noticeable. A phone call was made before he even got back, and he was immediately let go.
This was before any kind of legalization existed in the area.
What kind of HR rat snitched on him?
It’s HR. That’s basically their job. They pretend they are there to protect the employees, but they are mostly there to protect the company.
Ugh the war on drugs is so stupid.
Bringing an illegal substance to work is even dumber. Even if it is legal its pretty dumb to bring it to work
This feels like a bait question to get people to break the new “no politics” rule.
I just remembered someone got fired from my first week of working at my job… But I literally can’t remember what they looked like or their name. It’s freaking me out
Anyways he got fired because he left our client in the waiting room of a hospital. (We work with the special needs and left with all his medical information)
Oh boy, I’ve seen a few:
-
At a startup, one dude had obviously lied about his credentials. He was hired as a writer, but couldn’t write shit. He spent the entire day hitting on women and bitching about how his ex wanted support for a child he wasn’t convinced was his. He was fired about 3 days in…
-
When I was a student, I worked at a sports store. One girl there was, let’s say, packing in the chest compartment. She was also about 17, maybe 18. Most people were nice enough to not hit on her, but one day the security guard (who was maybe late thirties at the youngest) made a comment to me to say “I would absolutely destroy her back door, you know?” (but slightly more graphic). I told management, and she was brought in. She broke down, and went over all the off-hand comments he’d made to her. The manager immediately walked out, told him he was fired, and apologised to her.
-
An old employer hired this guy who was a Microsoft MVP nominee. The guy was one of those types that could talk brilliantly, but couldn’t take criticism. He listened to me, as I was senior, but ignored anything from managers or people at his level. To cut a long story short (I could write a book on this guy, and it would be hilarious) he lied about a project he worked on solo for six months. After checking in on his work we found he had bypassed our PR system and had been accepting all of his own requests, so no one has verified his code. It was an absolute mess. It cost the company a quarter of a million, for a project that should have brought in £50k. We later found out he was a nominee because he was so active on some Microsoft support forums, and mostly got that through posting “yeah I had the same problem” or from supplying easy or wrong answers. That loophole was closed shortly after…
That reminds me of a guy at a company party that was making lewd comments about the head of HR. He told the guy next to him he’d f her so hard, sparks would fly out of her vagina. Didn’t realize he was talking to her fiancé. Then, proceeded to grope another female employee. When they called him I to the front office the next day, he honestly had no idea he was getting fired. He thought he was getting a promotion.
-
There was an ice cream party for the company. Those who attended were laid off.
I’ve heard of similar things. Boss wants to see who is the least busy, so they do something like open an employee gym. Then anyone who uses it is fired, because “if you have time to use the gym, you’re not working hard enough.”
Exactly. There was also a puzzle table once. The higher boss said he loved to see people building teamwork and closer relationships and liked the puzzle. I luckily knew the whole time that even though he said this he fucking hated the puzzle. I winced everytime he’d catch someone working on it. Some people are just oblivious AF. “He said he likes the puzzle!” Yeah he said that, but he absolutely does not and you’re probably on the shit list now
Why??? I’m very confused!!
What the hell? And how didn’t it ended in a massive lawsuit?
Assuming not-Montana US, you can be fired for any reason other than membership in a protected class (race, religion, etc). Attending an ice cream social, even a company one, is not a protected class.
I feel like I need more context. What???
It was a frozen yogurt company. The ice cream was a ruse to smoke out those not committed to the cause.
Not quite fired but close enough. I know a guy who had gotten his 100% disability from the military during his first enlistment (basically only worked for about 2 years and then medical said he was borked so he was going to collect a paycheck for the rest of his life)
Then he popped positive for smoking weed on a random drug test and lost it all. Now he’s being discharged on an ‘other than honorable’ which means he loses all his benefits.
At a place I worked at previously, there was a guy who got fired because the company found out that he had been hiding cans of beer in the water tank part of the toilet.
Yes…you read that right, he would “take a bathroom break” so he could pound a beer a few times throughout the day lol.
I wouldn’t critique it that much honestly, except for the fact that he operated heavy equipment for his job, so yeah, not safe at all.
I worked at a assembly plant. One dude was throwing small screws at another coworker. He was fired for it.
There’s a linux command, called “touch” which sets the timestamp on a file. It’s used for several things, including testing that the user has write privileges and that the filesystem is working.
I heard of a sysadmin who used to use “touch kids”, creating or updating the file ‘kids’. Some sort of internalised joke, I assume. His boss told him not to because it was inappropriate. Then again formally when he kept on doing it. Dude couldn’t stop, like some form of muscle memory. Kept on using kids as a test filename.
So yeah, he got sacked pretty quickly.
