I was working in the IT admin office for a time while doing software development, and got to witness this guy who came in to have his laptop fixed/swapped; and he said “You guys don’t like, check the laptops for files and stuff, right?”.
And the IT guy was legendary, didn’t skip a beat, was like “Nah, nah, we don’t have time for that crap.”.
As soon as the guy was out of the room, we checked his laptop’s files.
Porn. So much porn. Like, gigs of it, and this was in the early 2000’s when that meant a lot.
We went to HR, and they called him up and reviewed, and SOMEHOW, he dodged the bullet and they retained him. The reason? It was his porn. You read that right. He had gigs of porn of him banging his stripper GF on his laptop, and because it wasn’t “downloaded” porn, he got off.
Then a month later he was let go when he was found taking pictures with his cell phone over the cubicle wall of a female employee without her knowledge.
But I’ll never forget the mental gymnastics that happened to convince HR that porn only meant pictures of “other people” being naked, not himself and his GF.
in the early 2000s*
I got fired for reading the newspaper during my lunch break. Once a week this newspaper came with a for hire section that also included career advice and al that stuff. I was reading that part but the CEO called me into his office to tell me off. I called his bluff and he fired me.
I was scheduled to lead a team in China for a few weeks and after that had to go to the US for some other job. Sadly people that are fired can’t work off premises anymore so the staff manager begged me to accept their withdrawal of my discharge.
I kindly declined and got payed out a years’ wage. Took the time to reorientate into less toxic work environment. I now work with politicians, don’t know what happened there.
This is technically fired, but it’s more like quitting. It doesn’t perfectly fit this thread but I love telling this story.
A few months into my first real job, the engineers got their raises (not me, I was new). 0%, after record profits, the team busting their ass and working insane hours, and promises of good raises. I think they got some gift cards or something.
One of my coworkers goes back to his desk, packs some stuff, walks to his car, and doesn’t come back. He got paid for a full month before they finally fired him. We got a beer after and he was like “oh I don’t think I’m gonna go back” in the most Office Space way
I worked with a guy who’s wife had just had a baby and the baby was sick. The guy was very good at his job but was working from home without really asking permission. We have some leeway in this matter but technically he didn’t clear it. His supervisor really had it in for him and was trying very hard to get him fired for falsifying his time card. I don’t know why he didn’t like him, but the supervisor was a real ass. It may have been racist motivation, but I’m not sure.
I should point out that I had asked this guy to do some work for me that I didn’t have the capability to do and this guy approached it in such a unique way that the customer and some universities were really interested in his work. This is a defense contractor environment where every working hour has to be accounted for. Whenever I asked the guy a question whether via email or telephone, he always responded immediately. It was all computer code so I didn’t see a problem with this.
When he came into work and told me what was going on I immediately contact the manager on his behalf.
Well bottom line is that management pretty much dropped the subject and the supervisor was walked out of the facility. Turns out he had been falsifying his own time card the whole time. How’s that for hypocrisy?
Justice served.
Someone at a no-paper, no-phones call centre I worked at had their buddy film them taking a call then they posted it to YouTube, both of them got fired when someone in management apparently saw it online.
Was the call noteworthy in someway? Like a prank or something? Or was management just worried about some breach of privacy?
If the call center handled sensitive info like banking info or credit cards etc the entire room would likely have compliance rules and zero tolerance.
It was me, I left a bad review for the pizza place I was working for. Owner was pissed, but to be fair I waited 2 damn hours for my delivery and when it still never showed up I just cancelled the order. I wasn’t even getting a deal on it.
WOW. RUDE.
(Them, not you.)
Making a racist joke in from of those people lol
I fired someone for ignoring their work, falsifying the records, and instead driving around all day in the company van playing Pokémon Go. Yes, the van has GPS. Yes, they were aware of this fact.
I should add, they had worked there for nearly 30 years, and transferred to my team. The individual had probably been shirking their duty in this way for their entire career, but the Pokémon Go thing was going on for several years at least. Their previous manager didn’t look into why someone with barely any customers was always so busy.
