At my last job these were reason for immediate dismissal:
I think 2 is the best option. Maybe PhotoShopping the head of HR onto a picture of a porn star and using it as your wallpaper.
I think the simplest way is just to have him claim a family emergency which requires him to leave town for a few months. He can ask his current boss to break the contract (as this is an emergency).
If the boss asks him whether he’ll be coming back, he can give some vague “we’ll see how things turn out”, and get all serious-faced.
Should be okay, as long as his colleagues don’t see him around.
CrunchyFrog - Did you try any of those things suggested in the other thread? As far a I could tell you never made any mention of things you tried. Anything?
I just want to be sure I understand here:
I’m sure I misunderstand; please correct. I’m sure that you and your boyfriend are honest reasonable people and wouldn’t act this way.
I’ll have to watch for this one on the HR website…
More seriously, though, I am going to paraphrase a quote from (I think) Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun. “If it can be solved with money, it is not a problem.” Most likely your friend’s breaking the contract entitles the employer to some type of financial restitution. Your friend needs to take that into account, and see if the new job is still worth it. Perhaps he can approach the current employer to negotiate the penalty down by working some overtime, weekends, etc. before (or even after) he starts the new job, and to leave his projects in good condition, help train a replacement, document the tasks, etc.
You said notice before. Is it a three month notice policy, and not a contract? Walking out on a contract with specific deliverables is bad, but if the company policy is giving a totally unreasonable three months of notice (which is guaranteed to cause the problems that he is having) then screw them.
Here is how it works in the US.
Employment is at will.
It is customary to give at least two weeks notice. However I know of cases where employers escort people giving notice out immediately. In Silicon Valley it is now common not to reveal the identity of your new employer until after you start work there.
Employers don’t like to file people, because they are then eligible for unemployment, and I believe the employer pays more if people get fired than if they resign. I doubt that this is the case in the UK.
As for getting fired, wouldn’t the easiest way is to just not do anything? I assume he has deliverables and meetings. If he didn’t show up to meetings, and didn’t do anything, and played solitaire all day or something, he might get fired - unless the company had a complex procedure for dealing with poor performers, that is.
As many well-meaning posters have pointed out in this thread, it may not be a great idea for her boyfriend to get fired from his job, but I had the idea that Daftbugger just wanted a list of funny things to give to her boyfriend, not engage in a debate regarding the merits of honesty and the finer points of UK employment law.
With that said, CrunchyFrog’s thread had several wonderful suggestions. I would also add that showing up to work wearing a Lone Ranger mask and cowboy, and absolutely nothing else, may getting him that firing that he so badly wants. Especially if he aims his penis at people like a gun.
Bang bang.
He could start noticeably stuffing the crotch of his trousers to enhance his package.
He should gradually build up, though. First day, one sock. Second day, two socks. Third day, one sock and a balaclava. By the end of the month, he should be shoving around a loveseat.
Not that it’ll get him fired, but it’ll sure be amusing. Especially if he makes absolutely no reference to it and pleads ignorance if someone asks him what’s going on.
Or, he could do as my friend Adam* once did at the retail chain he was chained to.
He requested a meeting with the store manager, showed up 10 minutes prior, the manger walked into his office to find Adam* urinating on his desk. Problem solved.
*Name changed to protect the whizzer.
Noone except very senior staff have contracts? Just about anyone in an office job over here in Australia has a contract, as do all government employees, employees of large companies etc. Wouldn’t that mean no distinction between casual and permanent staff??
It is customary to give two weeks notice? Do you mean they can fire you right now and not even pay you for the two weeks? How the hell is this allowed under your industrial relations legislation?!
Just gotta say…
BWAAAHAHAHAHAHA
Here in the US, WE WISH!
As for somewhat serious answers,
Correct.
Correct.
Correct.
And, what IR legislation? Unless you’re in a Union, you can just about forget it, IME.
(Sore point? Of course not!) :eek:
Um, Voyager doesn’t mean that the employer gives the employee a 2-week notice upon termination, he means that the employee gives the employer 2 weeks notice before quitting. In the US, if you are to be fired or laid off, you often don’t know until security shows up to walk you out of the building, or your boss calls you into his office and tells you not to come back any more, thanks ever so.
Relatively very few Americans are under any sort of contract – as a rule, only unionized employees and very senior staff (CEOs, VPs) are under such agreements. My employer can fire me for any reason, or for no reason, without notice and without severance. The only things for which I cannot be fired are race, color, national origin, religion, sex, age or disability. Anything else is fair game.
I and a lot of others know exactly what to expect from a company if they decide they don’t want us working there any more. If the companies won’t be loyal to the workers, why in hell should the workers be loyal to the companies? Answer: no reason. Corporate loyalty was always a two-way street, and the corporations turned it into a one-way street back in the 80s. You are more than a little behind the times, missbunny.
Yep, I got that. But it usually goes both ways…or so I assumed.
Holy shit, I had no idea the situation was so terrible. I’m amazed. You guys really need a Labor party. Only with, you know, ethics and stuff.
Exactly right! Thankyou Siddhartha Vicious.
Wiping the C drive IS a bad idea, has the need for more entertaining ways of getting fired. Whether he’ll do any of them or not is a completely different matter.
Same sort of thing happened at my place of work. Most people here are on 3 months notice. Someone found a job they wanted to leavr for, but they had to leave in 1 month. They tried to negotiate a reduction in the notice period and failed. They left after 1 month regardless. The Company here got a contractor in and then sued the guy for the cost of replacing him for the 2 months that he contractually still owed. I never did hear about the resolution of that case.
So first of all tell your boyfriend to BE CAREFUL. Im a programmer myself (in ABAP) and one thing I can say is that it’s a small industry. People move from company to company all the time, so in a few years, a bad reputation can become known in a wide arena. Also being sued can’t be fun. Whenever a new person is being interviewed, there is nearly always someone who has worked at the same company they are coming from, or knows someone who does. This sort of information becomes common informal knowledge and can affect your career.
That said, I have always heard that lighting up a cigarette at your desk will get you an instant dismissal at my place of work. YMMV
And you are either charmingly naïve or an exceedingly generous person.
You mean to say that if YOU owned a business and you knew for a fact that a prospective employee was going to seriously screw over his current employer for no reason whatsoever other than because you would pay more, you would have NO thoughts or suspicions that he might screw you over in the exact same way someday? You would have nothing in the back of your mind that if he fucked over the last guy, he wouldn’t fuck you over too?
Like I said, naïve or exceedingly generous.
And, what about this guy’s current employer is disloyal? He signed a contract and now he wants to renege on that contract. How is the company showing disloyalty? He’s the one who is not only doing something disloyal but planning to do something immature and stupid.
P.S. I am not under the delusion that corporations are benevolent gods who only want the best for their employees and who’d never, ever hurt them. But damned if I’d hire someone who has proven he makes promises, breaks them when he doesn’t get his way, and then acts like a child to “get” me when I’ve fulfilled MY end of the deal. That was my point in asking if the OP’s boyfriend had thought about his plan.
In any case, it’s not clear if the boyfriend is referring to a contract or a notice period (I agree that 3 months is highly unreasonable), and I think the OP said the new company doesn’t know of his plan to get himself fired. When I wrote that first post, it appeared that they did.
Correct. Anytime my company does anything, there is notice that everything is different away from the US.
Now, the higher you are in a company, and the more competitive the industry, the better deal you get when you are laid off. The two weeks is just convention - I’ve never seen any rules about it.
I guess there is an upside about employment at will after all.
Not sure which episode, but there’s a Seinfeld where George did everything he could to get fired from the Yankees, but it only made Steinbrenner love him more. Hilarious.