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?
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.
Honestly we do that when we ask and no one speaks up. Lovingly called the “scream test” as we wait to see who screams.
I guess it depends on where you work. This was a large datacenter for a very large health insurance company. They made it a point later that day to remind people that it was a fireable offense to mess with production machines like that on purpose. And evidently the service he disabled was critical enough that it didn't take long for the hammer to come down. There were plenty of ways to find out who owned the machine, he just chose the easiest and got fired on the spot for it.
Scream tests are a last resort though.
Where I worked we had a very important time sensitive project. The server had to do a lot of calculations on a terrain dataset that covered the entire planet.
The server had a huge amount of RAM and each calculation block took about a week. It could not be saved until the end of the calculation and only that server had the RAM to do the work. So if it went down we could lose almost a weeks work.
Project was due in 6 months and calculation time was estimated to be about 5 1/2 months. So we couldn't afford any interruptions.
We had bought a huge UPS meant for a whole server rack. For this one server. It could keep the server up for three days. That way even if wet lost power over the weekend it would keep going and we would have time to buy a generator.
One Friday afternoon the building losses power and I go check on the server room. Sure enough the big UPS with a sign saying only for project xyz has a bunch of other servers plugged into it.
I quickly unplug all but ours. I tell my boss and we go home at 5. Latter that day the power comes back on.
On Monday there are a ton of departments bitching that they came in an their servers were unplugged. Lots of people wanted me fired. My boss backed me and nothing happened but it was stressful.
Yeah, I've done that before – after asking literally everyone in IT, plus our external consultants, and getting the go-ahead from my team lead and the head of IT.
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.
We had a guy that would email the CEO with audio or video of him singing or something. Good dude. Sold people eggs every week from his hens. Got fired for actual bullshit his lead should've been canned for.
Hmmmmm. Been thinking about starting a youtube channel. Maybe ballads to the CEO could be the theme. I wonder how long before I get called in by hr.
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.
Did both parties involved in the transaction get fired?
I think the other guy got a warning but I'm pretty sure he wasn't fired
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.
Hopeful ship was at shore still at the time? Would suck to be fired while out at sea. Awkward ride back.
We were in Puerto Rico for our winter maintenance period, just starting to bring on crew for the sailing season. I’ve never worked on a boat where people drink underway and I don’t think I’d want to.
On boats you usually don’t get told you’re fired until you reach port.
When I was in the military, two officers got caught fucking in a stairwell. They were caught by a security camera while attending training. They were both married and not to each other.
There is so much stupid shit that you can get away with in the military, I have never understood why anyone would even get close to breaking the fraternization rules. They literally give you a copy of the rulebook in boot camp! Did no one read the damn thing?
I was a Nuke though, so up to my neck in daily fires to put out. No time for a social life.
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.
Hope the info sec guy got some hazard bonus. Doubt he/she would ask for it though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
———
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.
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
Classic kitchen employee right there.
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.
Help desk guy caught jerking off at his desk by a female employee, which he had apparently been doing for a while without a whole lot of cleanup, further investigation uncovered.
His keyboard, mouse, desk, floor mat, and chair were disposed of as hazmat. Monitor and PC were e-cycled.
I used to work tech support for a company that made a product which involved sharing live or recorded videos. We would use the same instance for testing and troubleshooting, which occasionally involved broadcasting live videos.
One morning, I signed on to look for something or other, and I saw that one of my co-workers (who was working from home) had a live feed. His camera was pointed straight at his crotch and he was going at it quite vigorously. I deleted the feed and I don't know if he ever even knew what happened.
Some fuckwad printed out several hundred illegal pictures in the middle of the day in a place accessible to everyone and with high foot traffic.
Needless to say he was walked out by the cops.
What a bizarre mind that must be. Fucking creep.
I wish I could tell you he looked creepy or we had some bad vibes but he was just a guy in the office. That part bugs me the most
Someone got really drunk and was in the bathroom willing to take all comers at a work function.
It was a shame, I liked working with them.
was in the bathroom willing to take all comers
Can't tell if they wanted to participate in sex acts or have a brawl
It was a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B.
Por que no los dos?
Yes.
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.
omg it wasn't "Dr Death" aka Christopher Duntsch was it?
No, he never got any media attention that I'm aware of. My concern is that he's just hopping from hospital to hospital - hiring on, fucking up, killing someone, getting fired, hiring on, fucking up, killing someone, etc.
Hospitals are pretty protective of their reputation and their doctors; and death is a thing that can happen in surgery so it be swept off as a "Oh well, patient signed off on the risks; and oh hey, this Dr said some mean things to our staff, so let's fire him for that and hope we don't make national headlines..."
Not that I've had a ton of surgeries, but I've had a couple, and anytime I go under, I'm desperately hoping that my surgeon wasn't a C student and has the calmest of hands.
Most docs have some kind of internet presence nowadays, so definitely look them up. Also in the later preop stages when you talk to your OR nurse, look your nurse in the eye and just straight up ask "Would you be comfortable with this doctor operating on you?" They won't be actually allowed to talk shit on their surgeon, but the second of panicked silence as they try to come up with some kind of non-answer without blatantly lying will tell you everything you need to know.
This might be like 30 mins before your surgery - you have the right to refuse up until you go unconscious. It'll feel dirty, but those standards exist for a reason.
Curious how common the truly bad ones are. I’d assume quite uncommon between licensing, hospital hiring, chart data analysis at scale, etc., but…
Counting down the days to a relatively minor surgery I need. No real concerns, I’ve met the lead surgeon a few times, but plenty of unknown humans are part of the process too.
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.
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.
That's a very bad decision as a manager, if I was another employee in that store I would take that to mean never control kids in the store, let the manager deal with that.
And if I was the friend I would have asked during that exchange with the manager present "So, I assume that means she's paying for everything the kid broke before I asked him to stop, right?" Just to see the reactions.
She was a very bad manager and always quick to make the customer happy. I ended up leaving shortly after that incident.
On a virtual meeting a guy unknowingly had his mic on and shouted to his kid "N....r sit your ass down!"
And got fired for that??
Company has low-key software trainers - a ton of information to convey, but they mostly embrace and gently corral the inevitable side convos you get in a Teams room of thirty very confused people.
Some of us were more vocal than others and a handful were less pleasant. During a brief silence, as a woman is about to ask a valid question, we ALL hear,
“Oh, there’s Jennifer, running her fat fucking mouth again! (Pause) (gasp from speaker)”
Guy wasn’t getting it anyway, but he didn’t last the rest of the morning.
There were 29 of us in that room, two years ago. Now there are six of us remaining. Mouthy guy above is the only one I know left involuntarily.
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.
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.
A... slab? Of wine?
Is that a whole pallet or something?
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
Okay, this is fascinating ... And makes me wonder how often this--what I will call "academic honorable discharge"--really occurs across institutions, well-known or not.
I haven't delved into your sources yet, so this is my somewhat educated guess ... Environmentally, this type of social breakdown makes sense with the lack of proper oversight, seasoned leadership, and organization appropriate to the study population. But did the low sodium diet itself serve any factor in the violence that occured in this botched study? Like, did kids being dietarily withheld a critical electrolyte affect the speed and intensity with which cracks in the camp structure split open?
Not trying to be too lighthearted here, but my guess in short: The kids went extra bonkers because of altered body and brain chemistry, with a lack of sodium (assuming the diet was initiated on Day 1) being a key aggressor in... making teen aggression more aggressive?
“academic honorable discharge”
I am aware of this happening in multiple cases involving scientific fraud... no idea how exactly this is being done though.
But did the low sodium diet itself serve any factor in the violence that occured in this botched study?
Not sure... but even without dietary interventions, there are a lot of simple explanations to how this could have gone wrong. This was a much larger study than the Camp Calcium series this PI did, a lot of the recruited kids are low income/from problematic households, with very little to no adult oversight, and there were very few activities for entertainment/enrichment... Also the dorm they lived in was technically separated by gender, but let's just say that it is not difficult to get to the other gender dorm... So yeah.
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.
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.
A manager got fired for sleeping with an underage waitress.
A GM got fired after stealing ~$13k from deposits
A guy got fired for telling the GM to go fuck herself completely unprompted.
Food service is wild
Manager (34) impregnated a delivery driver (16/17) and ran away to Tennessee because he couldn't be prosecuted for it there.
When I worked in data entry fresh our of college, there was a mass firing. Turns out people were signing in and leaving. Like, to go to the movies, to the store, to just hang out, for their entire shift, and would then log out at the end of the day. Damn near every person under 30 was gone. Some quit before they could get fired. It took all day, and there were plenty of performances. Now, it was data entry, which meant our activity was tracked, from the inactivity to how much we got through in a day. I have no idea how they didn't think anyone would notice.
Worked at sheetmetal manufacturing plant. Had aisles of welding booths. Old dude welder would smoke in the building in his booth letting the smoke get sucked through the table vents. Well sure as ahit one day a little more than just smoke gets sucked up and next thing you know thr whole ventilation system goes up in flames. Never saw the dude again.
Same plant but one of the robot welders, the worker would mount an unrelated electrical box on the robot welder rig. Then hit the foot petal and it would clamp 3 of the 4 sides down with a fuckton of pressure. Months after opening back up after ventilation fire this new chick was running the robot welders and steps on the fucking clamp petal while still holding everything in place. She clamped her whole hand smashing all the bones in her hand I think. Never saw her again either. It was a freak accident not even anything you can point a finger at. I guess she lost balance a little to make her step and didn't have her hands in way so the e-stop light bar that senses if you are in the way wasn't tripped but she slamed her hand onto the box as it was closing trying to catch herself.
They had tons of people I never saw before come in and assess the robots and turret presses and they installed the petals that have covering flaps you need to lift to get your foot in the petal. All in all the place was super safe and the dude that smoked was super fucking belligerent and was going to be fired the next infraction before burning the ventilation system down.
From my current workplace:
Someone was putting mail in a cabinet under their desk instead of the outbox, we're talking hundreds of letters/cheques/invoices and some life-changing documents from a few months.
The mail outbox was on their desk, and easier to reach than the cabinet.From previous workplaces:
- Breaking down a door and raping someone that had barricaded themselves behind said door.
- Sexual interference.
- not having a licence, and getting a DUI with a work truck that they stole.
And outrageous in a different way:
for only beating last year's sales by 3% instead of by 4%.Have you heard any specific reasons for the mail hoarder's actions at your current workplace, or is it still a fresh case? I'm guessing it was nefarious, since the mail outbox was closer and seemingly more obvious than the secret stashing cabinet. Just wanted to be a dingus to intended mail recipients? I'd also be curious if it was all mail they handled or just select pieces. So many burning questions!!
I am a contractor so I don't work in a standard office setting right now. I miss the heck out of juicy office gossip, at least about those who deserve such sordid stories! (Karen in accounting is actually really nice, Carl.)
The reason why some people think they did it was because it was their job to take the mail to the mail room. But they were also the person who needed to go to the mail room to get our mail every day, which they did, every day. If they were already taking the elevator down to the mail room to get the mail, why not take the outgoing mail?!?
We also found out that they were just marking tasks as complete about 20% of the time, so we had to double-check every task assigned to them for the previous 6 months.I earned my living with a hammer or a forklift for most of my life, and I never thought I would like the office gossip. But, It's kinda great.
It's generally a different level than it was with the construction guys.
"Joanne's boyfriend might be emotionally abusive, and she won't break up with him. Be kind to her."
vs
"John got drunk last night after losing custody, and put his new girlfriend into a coma. We'll need you to help with the gable overhangs."
Sex in the stock room. Caught by manager.
18, sex in the stock room, didn’t get caught.
Even had a handful of more standard dates afterwards, always with sex.
No negative outcome, fortunately. Except for the really damn cold stockroom floor, but that was her problem not mine…
Think we just lost interest, I moved onto another job, that was that.
Different times and companies, but I've seen people fired for
- being in his 30s and sleeping with the 14-15 year-old worker (I forget exactly how old she was). This was working in a movie theater and he was the GM.
- found CSAM on their computer
- many for sexual harassment (a few different jobs in IT)
I think that's it for the NSFW stuff.
I've had 2 coworkers lose their jobs for being diddlers, but nothing other than that really. Only other one 8 have, I didn't get to witness since I was living out of town at the time, but a shithead ex-boss got walked out by some feds and wasn't seen again. Gossip was it was INS, and it would serve him right to get deported.
Jerking it in the bathroom
It wasn’t even the unisex one
How did you get caught?
RIP in pepperonis OP
Oh, I never got caught
I just thought it was unfair because that’s what they’re there for
He got caught because upper management was visiting that day
An IT company I worked for many years ago went through a massive growing phase. One of the things that lead to this growth was the hiring of much more competent management, particularly in security and the data center.
Security actually started doing their jobs and started routinely doing network scans. They discovered two servers that were not located in the data center, which was a huge no no. The servers were running two porn websites off the company's internet connection. The guy had been doing it for years and apparently was making many times his company salary from them.