Surely no one will be surprised that this thread is the inspiration for the one you just opened. Please note when I say “fired” I mean “fired for cause,” as opposed to “laid off because the company could no longer afford to pay your salary.”
I’ve been fired either 3 times or 2 and a half times, depending on how you count.
The first time, or maybe the half time, was when I worked at a car dealership. I had gotten into trouble because I refused to scoop a rebate* when the shop was having hard times and needed every sale. I only count this as a half because the day I got fired I had gone in to quit anyway, as I had another job, and I’m not sure how they recorded it.
I was unequivocally fired from a banking job for inappropriate behavior at a convention in Vegas. This was, by any reasonable standard, my fault; if the 2009 Skald were the boss of the 2002 Skald, I’d have fired his ass too. Also punched him.
I was fired by the company I now work a few years back. This led to a great deal of bullshit, a lawsuit, and ultimately to the manager who fired me getting fired, as well as her manager, and–well, you get the idea. Plus I got my job back, obviously.
Ack! I promise I wrote the explanation that asterisk is supposed to tag!
Anyway…
Think back to the days of yore, when the economy was good and credit was easy. Let’s say you wanted to buy a Ford Expedition. Let’s say that Ford is offering a rebate of $2000 on this vehicle. Now, though the customer can, in fact, get this two grand from Ford, that never happened. Instead, the customer would sign a form authorizing Ford to pay that amount to the dealership; in other words, they’d be using the rebate as a discount.
But some customers have both really good credit and really poor reading & negotiating skills; they may walk onto the lot unaware of hte potential rebate and also say, up front, that they want to pay no more than, say, $500 a month. Sometimes we would discover that, during the credit process, a given customer could get the desired monthly payments, or even less, WITHOUT using the rebate. In that case, a crooked salesman or dealership may simply not mention the rebate to the customer. Then, after the customer leaves, the salesman would take the rebate-diversion form and forge the customer’s signature. Ford then sends the check to the dealership, and that amount is pure profit.
I refused to do that when told to by my manager, instead telling the customer “Hey, guess what! I can save you another two grand!” Thus saving the customer the $2000 dollars and costing me 30% of that and my job, but keeping my sense of moral superiority.
I’ve been fired exactly once, and no, it wasn’t my fault.
I was working in a warehouse, processing the mail for IBM. Our standing rule was that any mail had a “24 hours or less” turnaround- if a package came in, we had to get it out of the warehouse within 24 hours.
One afternoon, a truckload came in right at 5pm. I left at quittin’ time, figuring I’d be able to process the load in the morning. When I came in, unfortunately, I found out that I’d been fired. Apparently, “24 hours” in that case, meant “as soon as the load came in”, even though it would’ve taken 2-3 hours of overtime for me to handle it.
The actual story? In the warehouse I worked in, there were about seventeen of us peons… all under one warehouse manager. The guy was terrified that he was going to lose his job. The higher ups over his head nominated “employee of the month” every month, and I’d won it just a week or so earlier. He couldn’t block me from getting EotM, but he could certainly find reason to fire me.
I wasn’t the first guy he had done this to, either. A month earlier, a coworker had been fired in roughly the same situation- he won employee of the month, and had then been fired a few weeks later for being ten minutes late the day of a huge icestorm.
As near as anyone could figure, he was afraid that management would replace him with anyone who showed a lick of promise- so he’d find ways to fire employees of the month. It got to be that nobody wanted to win EotM, after a while.
I ended up getting a much better position a week later, but never heard what (if anything) happened to the manager.
I was fired from a landscaping job when I was 17. Oh, yes. It was my fault.
I hated it. With a passion. My father had gotten the job for so I didn’t want to quit. So, I did a really lousy job. Well, I performed tasks OK, but slowly and half-heartedly. I came in late and left early whenever I though I wasn’t being watched.
I had a field job inspecting fresh fruit and vegetables. I had worked there for three seasons and one day I called in sick (wasn’t sick) and then ran into one of the head supervisors at a bar that night. The next morning I got called into the office and was told to turn in my gear. I can distinctly remember standing there in our break room and saying something to the effect of “Are you kidding me? Am I the first guy here who called in sick when he wasn’t sick?” I then leaned in through our dispatcher window to where all of the supervisor’s desks were and yelled “Fuck you (pointing to the head guy), fuck you (his assistant), and fuck you (to the head supervisor).” I was shaking I was so pissed. Definitely burnt my bridge there.
But, it was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. At the time, I was in my mid-20s and had flunked out of college some years earlier. The next day, I went down to the local community college and registered for classes and then got a job delivering pizzas. Within 2.5 years I had finished and been accepted into graduate school.
I don’t fully understand this - if the customer is so clueless and only wants to talk about monthly payments couldn’t you just charge $2000 more for the car and then give them the $2000 rebate? You’d get the money, give them the loan for their agreed payment, and not risk being caught out for fraud …
I can’t recall a customer ever been that clueless. Instead it would be more like the customer failing to do due diligence. The car would be advertised for $35,000 or whatever; the customer would expect a price based on that, but never do the math to see what the interest would be, and also not know about the rebate. I’m sure I’m not explaining it well; it’s been a long time since I worked there, and I always refused to do it. I mean, any "sales technique’ which involves, as its crucial step, forging the customer’s signature, is probably bad.
Yes. From Wal-Mart for attendance; a hospital janitorial job for not wearing gloves; and my last job as a caretaker for reasons I don’t really know and didn’t bother to ask.
Bookstore clerk- you get thirty minutes for lunch, I eat quickly so I went to the arcade in the mall and was caught for what I thought was my time. It turns out it was only ‘my time’ as long as I was eating lunch. I don’t think they were comfortable hiring me in the first place which is what led to the unhappy incident (I was 17 and the average age of the employees was around 60).
Bar dj- A downward spiral for months at a college I hated culminated in me getting wasted on tequila, during which the gf broke up with me which led to me punching through a wall in that bar. All my fault.
Bartender- After working for many years there I took a vacation for two weeks and didn’t have a job when I got back. A major factor was office politics and a follow up witch hunt, I was the easiest witch to burn.
I was fired three times, once unjustly, the second time neither my fault nor the boss’s and the third time presumably because I just didn’t work hard enough (with no explanation). All three were while I was in HS (1950-1954).
In the first one, PA had just introduced its sales tax (only 1%, at first) and I was working in a drugstore. As did many merchants, we had a box by the cash and just collected the tax and put it the box. One day the box disappeared. Since it was by the register, anyone could have subrepted it while the pharmacist was filling a prescription or simply distracted. First he asked me if I knew anything and then, a couple days later told me he no longer required my services. He died of a brain aneurism about a year later in his mid-30s and I did not mourn. I was paid the princely sum of $3 for 15 hours a week, incidentally.
The second time was the following summer. Probably I was 16 and pretty damn naive. The druggist wanted to take an hour nap every day. I think it was probably illegal for him to leave the pharmacy unmanned. One day a man came in and asked for, “uh you know…”. A few more mens and haws and he finally went away. Only much later did I realize that what wanted was goddamned rubbers (now known as condoms, but I don’t think I had ever hear that word). He complained to the druggist later and the guy said he could not use me. Not his fault, really, and not mine either.
The third I have already described. There was another job I could and probably should have been fired from. It was in a lab at the university and came with very little pay ($1700/year) but half tuition and I did very little work. It got me through college and I’m not complaining.
Once. Restaurant job. I’d been there for 2.5 years in college. I was fairly flexible and I knew how to work the host station, do some of the cooking and help assemble some of the food platters.
However, one of the managers got too clever and decide to schedule me as a busboy. Sorry, but I wasn’t working on a Sunday night for roughly $4.00 per hour.
My fault? I don’t know. It was best that I left and started focusing more on school. I was falling into the sleep all day, work, party all night scene and that wasn’t helping my grades.
I came very close to being fired from a cafeteria job I’d been holding down part-time in college for three years. During the third year I got very depressed, as in ‘‘not bothering to climb out of bed’’ depressed, and stopped showing up to work. Then one day after I had called in, the boss called back. I was sick in bed and my clueless roommate told him I was at work… leading my boss to conclude I was working at my other part-time job, when in fact my clueless roommate thought I was at the job from whence my boss was calling.
Anyways, he fired me. I wrote a lengthy email defending myself and he agreed to keep me on a probationary basis, but I was so disgusted with the fact that he thought I was a liar I quit.
He was still very nice to me when we passed one another on the street.
As to whether it was my fault… yes. I only hope he realized how unlike me I was at that time due to crippling depression, and hope he will forgive me, because to this day he is one of the best bosses I’ve ever had.
I suspect that I was very close to being fired from my first job when I took another.
I’m not sure how to answer the *fault *question. I would say that I was not qualified to be in the position - I worked my ass off and put in many many hours, but I should never have *been *in the position to begin with.
The reason I was, was that they were paying so very little, they had to take someone fresh out of college.
If a man working for me today was as unqualified for a job as I was for that one, I would let him go. But to be honest, I don’t think I would have hired a person like that to begin with.
Now to be fair to me: They should never have been in the business either. They didn’t know what they were doing, they were underfunded and not a soul in there besides me knew anything about software.
I find it amazing that they are *still *in business, but they are.
First fire, I was working at one job I hated, so I interviewed around for another one. I found a place that wanted to hire me and talked me into giving 2 days notice to my old job. I did, and the day I started my new job, I came down with the flu. I didn’t want to call in sick on mu first day, so I went in anyway. I had 6 jobs I was supposed to complete, but I only managed 1. The fat fuck owner called me up that night and fired me. The old place wouldn’t hire me back.
Second time, I was working a part-time job watching a video game place at night. When summer ended, the guy who originally had my spot came back to school, and the owner wanted him back. He fired me for not shaving enough.
The third time, I had a great job, got along great with all my coworkers, and wanted to work long enough to retire from the place. But, I, oblivious to my impeding self-destruction as usual, lit the match that start burning that bridge behind me ever so slowly. I bitched about one of the project managers in my Livejournal blog. I thought the guy was incompetent and in way too much over his head. His method to to deal with any problem that came up was to panic like Chicken Little and cc about 16 people in email, much like the act of using a sledgehammer to drive in a thumbtack. Usually, all it would turn out to be was that a client didn’t zoom in on a graphic label close enough and thought the “ll” in “dollar” was a little square.
Problem is, when I did my online bitching, I:
[ul]
[li]used his real name.[/li][li]made the posts public.[/li][li]posted during work hours.[/li][/ul]
Upper management found out about it and I got doosed. Don’t judge me.
Got fired once, from a bartending job in a pub in Sydney.
It was one of those city pubs that are only open weekdays, and catered to the suits of the city’s legal and financial district. We were really busy at lunchtime, and in the evenings after work. The customers were, almost without exception, Grade A assholes.
I got fired for arguing politics with a couple of customers. At the time, there was a movement among gay activists to boycott products from the state of Tasmania, in order to protest against the state’s criminalizing of homosexual sex, and other discriminatory laws. These two guys came into the bar and ordered a Tasmanian beer, Cascade lager, and they basically said “Fuck the boycott.” I asked them why they didn’t agree with it, and told them that i thought Tasmania’s laws were shit, and it descended into a debate over gay rights.
They left after one beer, and the pub owner, who had heard the argument, canned me after work that day. She was a fucking bitch anyway, and the economy was such that i had applied for, and been offered, three different jobs by the end of the week.
Just once. I got fired from the Baskin Robbins when I was 17.
It was partly my fault… I wasn’t very good at my job - I had trouble remembering how to make the less popular stuff like milkshakes, I was a bit shaky when dealing with multiple orders and I wasn’t very quick at scooping.
In my defense, though, the owner-slash-manager couldn’t be arsed to train anyone and had the managerial skills of a hairy ape. He’d bugger off for hours at a time, leaving me by myself in the store, and his philosophy on training was “I’ll show you once, I’ll tell you once, and then you’re on your own”… which doesn’t exactly work well for a kid who’s just taken on their first real-world type job (and at minimum wage, I’m not sure how he expected to get anything better than that).
Actually, come to think of it, they didn’t even have the guts to officially fire me. They just stopped giving me hours on the schedule for a few weeks, and eventually told me they didn’t need me any more. The message was pretty obvious, though.
I was fired from my first “real” (i.e., after college) job because I flat out wasn’t very good. They gave me a couple of months to find my footing, and when I didn’t, they gently suggested I’d be a better fit somewhere else.
My last job I was either fired or one small pawn in a months-long reorganization that ended up with everyone in the department leaving. I’m still not sure.
