There are plenty of ways to get let go from your job, even if it’s the kind of job where it’s unusual to hear about someone being fired.
But some people still manage to surprise us with their creativity in this aspect, and stories like these are almost guaranteed to be hilarious. When someone online asked Redditors about the dumbest things their coworkers got fired for, people bombarded this thread with incredibly amusing responses. Scroll down to see the best ones!
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Guy tried to hit on the girl that helped us clean up after closing time by inviting her to the back "for some fun times, just me and you baby." Girl was 15 years old and *the daughter of the owner*.
Had a coworker who had a princess mentality. She thought she could do whatever she wanted one day and decided to test the waters.
She decided to start leaving early without clocking out. The first one or two times people were fine doing it for her because maybe she was forgetful.
However, she’d leave at 12-1 and then text someone around 5-6p to log her out.
Then it became repetitive. Leadership didn’t do s**t.
Then one day - she walked into the office kitchen, took someone’s lunch out of the fridge and decided it was hers. She saw it was a sandwich but wasn’t sure what it was and literally walked up to the very coworker whose lunch she stole and asked him ‘Hey what’s in this sandwich?’ She didn’t know it was his.
Lost his f*****g s**t. That’s what got her. Asking someone what was in the sandwich she stole. Asking the very person who made that lunch. They finally decided to get her for timeclock fraud too.
He pantsed a guy in the middle of the office.
Literally pulled a Co-workers pants down in front of the full office. Underpants came along for the ride.
The pantser was fired.
The pantsee was off work for 6 weeks due to “distress”
The last time I pantsed someone/thought pantsing someone was funny was when I was 10 and in elementary school. The kid cried. We all felt immediately horrible. Never did it again. Pretty sure most people grow out of pantsing someone (or finding it funny) at age 13, max :/
Had a friend call in for him. "Mike got run over by a car, he's dead".
The next day when I fired him he demanded his last check. I told him we would send it to the next of kin.
She already had a few trips to HR and then got moved to another department at another site.
She went out to her car to go to lunch, then came back into the office. She then claimed someone put a note on her car in the parking lot that read: “Get out of town, racial epithet.”
Hands note to supervisor. She got loud in the office area, started to list off names of who she suspected, and everyone heard what was going on.
HR pulls her into a meeting later that afternoon and says “we had security pull the video recording of the parking lot for the first 4 hours of the day…do you wish to change your story?”
She was let go immediately.
Who would have thought that people who play the victim card actually do this sort of thing? I for one am shocked.
Did a minor safety infraction 10 minutes into the job, I pointed it out.
He stormed off saying "Nobody tells me what to do".
A male coworker hid under a coworkers desk first thing in the morning. Unfortunately for him, he didn't realize a desk swap had happened the day before. Woman sits down on the chair, and that's when he chose to scare her. She injured her abdominal area on the underside of the desk because she was 7 months pregnant.
She moved to that desk to be closer to the washrooms. Instead, she went on sick leave for the rest of her pregnancy because of the resulting injury/trauma.
He took a turn too fast on the fork truck. Got two wheels lifted off the ground. Supervisor told him to cut it out and drive safe.
“Safe?? **SAFE???!?** NOTHING in this place is safe!!”
And then he spent twenty minutes running around the plant floor tripping alarms and setting off the emergency air horns to “prove” that none of it worked (all of it worked).
He finally left when the super threatened to call the cops.
Everyone was real confused about his outburst… until we found the half-empty bottle of tequila out behind the dumpster.
I have a few from people I worked with:
One guy stood at the bottom of the stairs and pretneded he was fiddling with his phone but was trying to get upskirt pictures of the women walking down. A woman coming down the stairs saw what he was doing and called security. That was a weird HR experience. The guy, who in previous interactions seemed pretty normal, was creepy as hell. Only time while I was there that we had to follow threat procedures. Didn't have to worry about him very long though because the cops found a lot of those types of videos on his personal computer and apparently some underage stuff too so he got locked up.
I had to fire a woman because she would not stop trying to get the people who reported to her to buy her kids' school fundraiser items. It was against company policy for managers to directly solicit but there was a way to have an admin post things so that it was blinded, that way people didn't feel pressured to purchase things from the person responsible for their compensation increases and bonuses.
There was a front desk admin at this one place where I worked who was generally unpleasant but very good at her job so that wasn't enough to let her go. A data analyst who was on maternity leave came into the office with her baby. We all gathered near the front because it was a quick visit. I asked the data analys how her husband was doing (poor guy was in a car accident the week before) and the admin went off for 5 minutes about how could anyone ask about her husband when it was the woman who did all the work and had to carry the baby and breastfeed and stay up all night when it cried. When she tired out the CFO looked at the head of HR and said, "How about now?" Admin was gone within the hour.
New office assistant was asked to drop some laptops off at Fedex to be shipped. Come to find out she literally just walked in, saw the line was too long and just left them on the counter. She expected FedEx to know what to do with them. We have no idea what happened to them. They decided to keep her, which was a mistake because she ended up emailing all of our competitors highly sensitive information by mistake.
my immedate supervisor planned a european vacation with her girlfriend for a year. Got time off in writing, paid out $12000 in advanced deposits etc. Two days before she was supposed to leave the big boss said he was going on vacation and she had to skip her european fully paid trip. She went anyway and got fired for it.
I worked at dollar general. Pretty hard to get fired there. My coworker got caught selling [substances] to customers. They just nicely asked him not to anymore. Half my coworkers were drunk or high. If you get fired from dollar general, you really f****d up.
They thought there was 10 inches in a foot, and did a bunch of over-height trucking permits wrong (example: writing 13.6 feet at 13 feet 6 inches) and ended up delaying the shipment of a crane for a critical construction job which got the entire trucking company blacklisted.
This sounds like they weren't familiar with imperial system and thought it works the same way as metric.
Dude I worked with at an outdoor retail store lit off a can of Bear Spray, indoors, during business hours.
I wasn’t there at the time, but as the Outdoor Supervisor, I got called in to deal with the mess.
Thankfully, the idiot fired it into a corner behind the gear counter, so he mostly got himself. However, Bear Spray comes out in a kind of dense fog, unlike “regular” pepper spray that comes out in a stream.
The whole store had to be evacuated and it took like 4 bottles of neutralizer to get the carpet “clean” again.
Dumb Dumb claimed he dropped it by accident, but the security camera showed him very clearly popping the safety and hitting the thumb trigger.
During his out-processing, the GM and I showed him the video and asked what was actually going through his head. He said:
*”I wanted to see how bad it was. It was really bad”*
The intrusive thoughts won, I guess.
Last I heard, the dummy had bought a tow-truck and started a towing business.
I mean it's made to stop a 1000lb (453kg) charging animal soooo yeah it might be unpleasant.
He brought cough drops into the work site.
Now this might seem minor, but I work for a company that breeds rodents for laboratory testing. *The* top concern, after the welfare of our animals, is biosecurity. When I get to work in the morning, I strip completely naked, pass through a timed, locking shower, and then dress in sterile clothes provided by the company. The *only* items we are allowed to bring through the showers with us are prescription eyewear or hearing aids. *Any* other item, unless specially authorized by management, is an automatic firing. Can't even wear my wedding ring or simple stud earrings.
I know the dude knew this, because they are VERY clear about it and he'd worked there for years. I guess he just thought if he tucked it behind the spare uniform in his cubby nobody would know. But our manager happened to come inside that day, he saw the bag, asked whose cubby it was, and that was that.
The really sad thing was that this was at the beginning of covid, so even if he wasn't sick with covid all he had to do was tell management that he had a bad cough and they would have given him time off with pay until he got better. He threw away a steady, well-paying job in the middle of a pandemic because...I don't know, I guess he was too proud to call out sick?
This man was ridiculous. Paid time off while you mend and he threw that away? For what? To power through it? Ridiculous.
Called the boss an a*****e at a staff meeting. Speaking truth to power is rarely a good idea, especially in front of a laughing crowd.
ok I may be downvoted for this but i think this might be funny on context. If the worker was a a*****e then screw them, if the boss was actually a a****e then hilarious.
Smelled a stool a woman had been sitting on in front of a room full of people like it was a fine and normal thing to do.
My brain initially interpreted the use of 'stool' as the type of stool more commonly used as in 'stool sample' and I did a hard 'wtf'
My first interpretation was that a woman pooped on her chair in front of everyone, and the smell gave it away.
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I actually saw a guy do that at work too. He wanted to know if she was ovulating or menstruating.
A coworker infested the office with fleas, but he didn't get fired until he did it *a second time*.
The first time it happened, the boss closed down the office and had an exterminator come in, and told the guy "Here's a laptop. You telecommute now."
It turned out, he lived in a trailer with over a dozen stray cats. He kept taking in these strays and just not doing anything for them - no shots, no flea treatments, not even a bath. So pretty soon, the whole place was infested with fleas. He just didn't realize how bad it was because he was on some cocktail of medications that made him smell odd. Apparently the smell made the fleas not want to bite him. They just got in his clothes and he carried them to work.
After a few days, he was already complaining to my boss that the laptop didn't work right. My boss tried to send me to this guy's trailer to fix whatever was wrong, but I said I would rather quit than set foot in Fleapalooza 2012. So he told my coworker to just deal with it himself.
A couple weeks later, the guy came in to the office to pick up his paycheck. In the 30 seconds he was inside, he infested the place again. After that, everyone threw a fit. The boss only fired the guy to avoid a full-scale revolt.
A friend's coworker got fired for paying [escorts] with the company's credit card.
I work for the Canada Revenue Agency, and we are instructed to never look at our own file upon being hired and told in no uncertain terms that it will be immediately flagged and would be the end of your career. At least once a year around tax season I will get a memo reminding us of this because several people looked up their own file.
Plugging your phone into your computer is also a big no-no because it can store information or compromise the network, I get yearly reminders about that too. I once watched a co-worker plug her phone in, I told her to take it out, but it was too late and she was escorted out within the hour.
Dude made a coworker uncomfortable by asking her out and not taking no for an answer. She mentioned something to HR in passing and they jumped on it. He was told to not contact her for any reason until HR can work out what to do (basically just over the weekend).
He contacts her and got fired on the spot. I talked with him about it after and he just did not understand what he did wrong. Worst part is he was planning on showing up to a work event even though he was fired. Thankfully he at least took my advice to not do that.
I worked at a Sonic and we had a new policy: no leggings. They hung up signs around about it, texted the group chat, the whole nine. They did this for two weeks.
A co-worker came in with leggings and refused to go home and change or use the spare pants one of my co-workers kept in the car. She was fired.
I saw someone get let go because they didn't have a "good attitude."
For context:
Myself and a few other people had just been hired for an entry level accounting job. Those first few weeks/months were... rough.
The CFO had a tendency of greeting newer people without telling them who he was. One would never expect this guy to be in C-Suite by the way he dressed. He didn't even have a LinkedIn profile, so unless one dug around it was hard to figure out who he was.
Anyways, he stopped by our pod and greeted us. Asked us how we were doing.
One guy made the mistake of being honest and said that he was tired. And not in a cheery way. I didn't blame him. We were all tired.
The next day this guy was "let go." I overheard later from a gossiping supervisor that the CFO hated "bad attitudes" and made it a point to remove them from the company whenever possible.
Since then I have been extra-guarded about how I respond to questions whenever I join a new company until I learn who to trust.
CFO is the one with a bad attiude . Probably doesn't undersrand how tiring the work is, cause he never did it himself.
Worked at a grocery store for my first job. Friend got fired for Not taping his receipt to his bottle of water he kept at his register. Manager said, "It sends the message to customers that employees get free products."
Luckily the manager herself was also fired not long after that for being all around s****y and our new manager was crazy awesome.
A coworker of mine called in to say he was sick, one hour before he was supposed to start his shift. Two hours later, he is observed at a bar by several employees, where he then takes pictures with them as if nothing has happened. As stupid as it is, he sends these pictures to people who are currently at work. This was of course forwarded to the boss the next day
It's disappointing and worrying how many people these days get fired for posting images on social media of themselves doing things that they shouldn't be, eg going on a zip wire while claiming disability. Serves them right of course, but how dumb do you have to be?
He just didn't log into work. It was a remote job, he was new, we weren't expecting a lot of him. But he wouldn't log in or respond to Teams messages asking how he was doing in an entire day. Honestly pretty stupid like, you don't even have to _go_ to work.
He probably posted his sleeping during night security job and a life hack on board Panda.
We have a machine shop and had just hired a new machinist. On his second day, he stole a bar of metal at the end of his shift. When confronted about it, he said he sold it for scrap. The scrap value of the bar was less than he made per hour.
My brother told me about this machinist on the night shift at his company who was using the CNC to make himself some steel knuckles...
Smoked [substances] before work, got on an airport tug towing a brand new piece of equipment, and smashed into the engine of an airplane.
The company I worked for moved to a new office in a different building. the owners of the building served everyone lunch as a welcome gift. There were several platters of food. At the end of one of my coworkers shift, she took a whole platter home with her, without permission. This was before half the staff were able to have any of it. The next day she came in she was fired. She honestly didn’t think she did anything wrong. It was for her kids.
People like this woman always use kids as an excuse to *steal* leftover food. It's not difficult. Ask if you can take it home for your kids. Simple.
They sat in the "wrong" seat during a meeting.
It was their second week on the job.
I work at a factory, we use a temporary worker system where a separate agency will do the hiring process, they work at the factory, and usually if they show up and do a passable job, they get hired.
The bar is low for a reason though.
We had these two utility workers get into some kind of sports related argument on the line one day. One is temp, one is not, They start to get loud enough that people are looking around corners to see what's up.
Temp guy does a thing where is looks like he is doing an exercise to touch his toes.... and pulls A KNIFE out of his shoes! He sends the people nearest to him running in panic as he attacks the other utility guy!
Knifey gets pulled to the ground and disarmed. Cops get called, but he runs away before they show up. Immediately fired and I never found out honestly if he was arrested or not. The guy who was attacked ALMOST lost his job anyway because of a b******t no tolerance policy.
The place I worked at is famous for it's "Advantage Card", a loyalty card scheme.
A guy I worked with fraudulently added £75 worth of points onto his own card using his own till login at our own store (sometimes we got sent to other stores to cover shifts).
It's dumb because it couldn't have been *more* traceable if he had a big neon f*****g sign saying "I'm committing fraud":
* Whilst certain staff have the power to manually add Advantage Card points to a card, any amount greater than £20 worth gets flagged to Head Office automatically. The store manager is then called upon to account for it. This is well-known among staff; dude added £75 in one go.
* Dude added it to his own card taken out in his own name. Anyone can apply for one of these cards and you don't need to provide ID (or even really valid details).
* Dude used his own till login to process it all. Even if it *wasn't* fraudulent and *wasn't* for a silly amount, we cannot add points to our own cards under any circumstances - we have to get another employee to do it.
He was arrested (Boots count it as theft and prosecute as a matter of policy) and sacked, 2 weeks before Christmas.
Drunk driving their company service vehicle over 100MPH at 1:30AM from a bar. Video showed them weaving all over the place. Thank goodness they didn't kill someone!
I worked for Aston Martin here in England. One day HR got a phone call from Jaguar asking "why was their car being driven at 100 mph down country lanes?" This was minutes before he crashed it. Over here the big companies lend their cars out to competitors for "benchmarking " and this one had a tracker. Love to hear how they explained that.
I just heard that a guy at my company was fired on the spot when he was caught with a stack of other employees badges. He was badging each one in at the door so the other people didn't have to come in to the office that day.
Business trip to PA, shot a buck, packaged it on dry ice and sent it back to the office using the office Fed Ex account. The delayed parcel arrived as a bloody, smelly mess.
Not quite fired but I was called in for a disciplinary for turning up a few hours late to work and not letting them know. The reason I was late was because my 3.5 year old sister had gone missing.
We actually found her in the house hiding inside a small cabinet after 4 hours of despair, police involvement and frantic searching 🙃
Hold up? After they found her sister and everything was settled, did this person not even let their work know before they left home heading to work or on their way to work or even after arriving late to work?! Did they just show up, clock in, and not give an explanation???
Dude shows up drunk as f**k, co worker is working in a bucket lift, drunk guy decides to prank him by removing key. (way out of line even by our standards). Drunk guy then proceeds to break the key off in the machine while trying to turn it back on. He was surprised he got fired.
Other story, dude ran from the cops after getting pulled over on his way to work, obviously they pursued his vehicle. He tried to hide in the jobsite. End clients were on site and less than impressed. He was also a bit surprised after being relieved from his duties.
A lady lost her wallet and someone turned it in. When she picked it up from security she noticed $200 was missing from the wallet. Security replayed the camera videos and a security guard that found the wallet had taken the money out and pocketed it. This was Simone Biles' mom this happened to
An employee dropped his wallet outside of the cafeteria doors and a security guard watched on camera another employee finding the wallet a bit later and taking money out of the wallet and walking away
A bank teller (previous coworker) was "faking" referrals to bankers by saying she spoke to clients about getting them to sit with a banker to open savings accounts, credit cards, etc. when the clients were just considered walk-ins
An overnight manager did not know her drawer was going to be audited the following morning and left work with $300 from her drawer. Management still needed to do the audit and she did not return the money in time
Gawd I have so many
Got fired on my day off for saying hi to the girls in the ticket booth. 16 and went in to get my check. Had to walk by the booth to get to the office. 1 of the girls asked why I was in.
Before I could speak the owner says, you know the rules,( No talking to the girls) you are fired. Left and had a panic attack on the interstate.
3 days later the secretary calls and wants to know where I have been. Told her ask the boss. Well, just come on in.
NOPE.
I had a friend who was fired for enjoying her job. Her boss said that wasn't good, the company owner thought people worked better when stressed and unhappy. Oddly, that company is still in business. One job I had, a contractor was fired for sitting in his cube watching porn. Not only could IS track our computer usage, it was in full view of anyone who walked by.
I had a coworker get caught staying at work late to watch porn ON MY COMPUTER. He couldn't even use his own?!
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Does anyone actually read the text in the posts that isn't the stolen comments?
I had worked in a family run drapers shop which also sold womensclothes. We were allowed to take clothes home on approvel a) to try on and b) to show parents (1960s) We had to have them entered before we took them into the staff room.The son was suspicious that the two new girls were stealing and asked 3 of us who had been there awhile to keep our eyes open. Went for my break and saw one of our personal design paper bags on the top of one of their bags in full view. Checked in the book nothing. Checked with another member of staff if they had been asked to enter something in the book, no. Then checked with the bosses wife who ran the upstairs department. She and her husband went up to the staff room and called the owner of the bag upstairs. She was dismissed at once and gien her weeks wage. Afterwards, her friend insisted that she hadn't meant to steal them
When I started a new job I was warned by multiple people that if the owner cought you wearing a red shirt you would be immediately fired.
Many years ago one of my wife's coworkers had a side hustle, and advertised it in the local weekly newspaper. No one would have cared, except she put her work phone in the ad for people to contact her instead of her home phone, and then she just couldn't understand why that wasn't okay. After that she had plenty of time for her side business.
I used to work in a factory that produced meat based products. I heard of a guy hired to work in a department where they packed meat into boxes got fired in about half an hour. He changed the labeling of boxes from the actual product to read 'a slang word of male private part'...
I used to work customer service for a major bank. New guy (literally the batch before me, and I was only there for a solid two month by then) shows up for his shift in a Porsche. Initially all of us thought his parents rewarded him for something until it was time for the 1/2 yearly auditing. My floor manager at the time found that his credit card (we all applied for an annual fee-free one when joining the company, something like an employee perk) had almost 5x the limit our employee cards had (literally making him seem like a platinum/business-level card user). Turns out he had used his clearance access into the system to boost his card's limit and simultaneously lower the minimum payment per month to almost peanuts compared to how much he spent (we all had access to the system but company policy forbade us from messing with the card limits). Dumb cluck either forgot or didn't know that the system logged all access and changes made to card limits. Needless to say he was marched out of
our headquarters and straight to the nearby police station. As far as I'm concerned, he was always the flashy type (a week into training, he had already bought a 3k watch to try and impress some of the new girl recruits) and had very little regard for things he considered cheap i.e. eating at the cafeteria, what type of car you drove etc. Last I heard, he was having a hard time finding work because of said record, had to drive a beater with eternal engine issues and was bumming at a few places because his parents kicked him out.
Load More Replies... I had a friend who was fired for enjoying her job. Her boss said that wasn't good, the company owner thought people worked better when stressed and unhappy. Oddly, that company is still in business. One job I had, a contractor was fired for sitting in his cube watching porn. Not only could IS track our computer usage, it was in full view of anyone who walked by.
I had a coworker get caught staying at work late to watch porn ON MY COMPUTER. He couldn't even use his own?!
Load More Replies... Does anyone actually read the text in the posts that isn't the stolen comments?
I had worked in a family run drapers shop which also sold womensclothes. We were allowed to take clothes home on approvel a) to try on and b) to show parents (1960s) We had to have them entered before we took them into the staff room.The son was suspicious that the two new girls were stealing and asked 3 of us who had been there awhile to keep our eyes open. Went for my break and saw one of our personal design paper bags on the top of one of their bags in full view. Checked in the book nothing. Checked with another member of staff if they had been asked to enter something in the book, no. Then checked with the bosses wife who ran the upstairs department. She and her husband went up to the staff room and called the owner of the bag upstairs. She was dismissed at once and gien her weeks wage. Afterwards, her friend insisted that she hadn't meant to steal them
When I started a new job I was warned by multiple people that if the owner cought you wearing a red shirt you would be immediately fired.
Many years ago one of my wife's coworkers had a side hustle, and advertised it in the local weekly newspaper. No one would have cared, except she put her work phone in the ad for people to contact her instead of her home phone, and then she just couldn't understand why that wasn't okay. After that she had plenty of time for her side business.
I used to work in a factory that produced meat based products. I heard of a guy hired to work in a department where they packed meat into boxes got fired in about half an hour. He changed the labeling of boxes from the actual product to read 'a slang word of male private part'...
I used to work customer service for a major bank. New guy (literally the batch before me, and I was only there for a solid two month by then) shows up for his shift in a Porsche. Initially all of us thought his parents rewarded him for something until it was time for the 1/2 yearly auditing. My floor manager at the time found that his credit card (we all applied for an annual fee-free one when joining the company, something like an employee perk) had almost 5x the limit our employee cards had (literally making him seem like a platinum/business-level card user). Turns out he had used his clearance access into the system to boost his card's limit and simultaneously lower the minimum payment per month to almost peanuts compared to how much he spent (we all had access to the system but company policy forbade us from messing with the card limits). Dumb cluck either forgot or didn't know that the system logged all access and changes made to card limits. Needless to say he was marched out of
our headquarters and straight to the nearby police station. As far as I'm concerned, he was always the flashy type (a week into training, he had already bought a 3k watch to try and impress some of the new girl recruits) and had very little regard for things he considered cheap i.e. eating at the cafeteria, what type of car you drove etc. Last I heard, he was having a hard time finding work because of said record, had to drive a beater with eternal engine issues and was bumming at a few places because his parents kicked him out.
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