Have You Ever Witnessed A Hostile Departure From Your Workplace?

In My Humble Opinion
41

Just a few weeks ago! New employee, batshit insane (or possibly bipolar in a severe manic phase), about 5 ft 2, 100 pounds soaking wet, and after 3 days, very obviously not going to work out.

Betty the HR Lady asked Nancy Nutjob to come into her thick-walled corner office, clear on the other side of the cube farm. Through the roar of 80+ bill collectors doing our thing, we heard inarticulate shrieks of rage, alternating with bellowed obscenities. Our unofficial security force (3 Super-sized, very self-controlled Marines-turned-phone-monkeys) hightailed it to Betty the HR Lady’s office, as someone (not me) called the police.

The Supersize Team carried Nutjob Nancy, kicking and shrieking at the top of her lungs that she would find her “cards if you” (checks the forum – nope, not the Pit) “bleepity bleeping blEEEEps would just be LIISSSSSSSten to MEEEEEEE!!!”

She was standing in the fountain, apparently still cussing, when the cops showed up.

At that point, one of the supervisors shut the blinds, so we all missed the conclusion of the drama.

I have to assume she was let go for not providing whatever documentation was required, officially. Unofficially, it was because she sang instead of speaking to real people, attempted to dismantle her monitor with an emery board to remove the elves, and talked, when she wasn’t singing to us or the debtors, to her invisible friend named Charlie. I feel sorry for her, but . . . dayum!

42

Fool! Emery boards are of no use against monitor elves. Poor deluded soul… A Leatherman Multitool, however, can defeat even the staunchest of monitor elves.

43

:smiley:

44

When I worked the 4pm-12am shift at the answering service, I got to spend from 11pm-12am with the graveyard operator. One particular night, the graveyard operator (let’s just call her “C”) decided to argue with a tow truck driver. The tow truck driver had some choice words about “C” which she overheard as he was hanging up. When she decided to try round 2 with this tow truck driver, he told her she was crazy. She had a shitfit and tried calling our boss, their boss and anyone else she could think of to tell her tale of woe to, despite the fact that she was behaving in exactly the manner the tow truck driver had accused her of. At approximately 130am she decided to walk out leaving me there all by myself to call the boss and let her know that “C” had quit. Those were exciting times.

I also remember when another graveyard shift operator quit because he thought he had been replaced without being told about it. Turns out, he wasn’t actually replaced at all. The other graveyard operator had simply gone on vacation and someone else was covering for them. But this guy thought he had been fired and not told about it, so he decided to quit! Oops!

45

Elves? In the monitor? That’s just crazy talk. Everyone knows they’re just tiny little humans, not elves at all. Crazy lady.

46

Maybe the previous person who had that particular computer had downloaded an Amy Brown screensaver, and this is what confused “Nancy Nutjob”?

47

I embarrassed one of my bosses into quitting, does that count?

I worked for a company that had several different restaurants. Since we were the least busy location, we often - OFTEN - got new-hire managers to train. I had 32 different managers in my last six years there. Frequently, these managers were young men who’d recently graduated from the fast-food industry, and we’d have to gently disabuse them of the notion that they knew everything there was to know about running a restaurant. One refused to be so disabused, and informed me that my 15 years of employment with this company were of no interest to him, because he was a MANAGER and I was a waitress. He had the bad judgement to say this during a fairly busy lunch hour, when I had a good number of regular customers, and berate me in front of them for not doing something that he had told me to do, but was actually against company policy.

I said, “Look, you don’t want to have this conversation with me right now.”
He said “YOU CAN BE REPLACED, YOU KNOW!”

I’d had enough. I turned around and poked him in the chest with my finger and said, “Listen, you twerp, I was working here before you had hair on your pee-pee. DO NOT tell me how to do my goddamned job.”

He went into the office to write me up for insubordination, but the general manager told him that I had seniority over him. :stuck_out_tongue: He left immediately.

48

Haha, “before you had hair on your pee-pee!” LifeOnWry, that is TOO funny!!!

49

LifeOnWry, you are awesome. My mother just sold the family restaurant this past December and the new owners think they’re hot shit. But get this, they’ve never worked a food service job, let alone manage one. They are screwing up left and right and I just want to get in the owner’s face and do what you did to your old boss. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t an unprovoked reaction from me. We offered to train them in EVERYTHING for a month before escrow closed. They didn’t show up until one week before escrow closed. Then they asked us if we’d stay longer because they didn’t think it would be that hard to run a restaurant.

I went back there and they turned an authentic 35 year old restaurant into a cheap boba place. They took down the paintings my family brought from Thailand, and painted the walls LIME GREEN. shudder

Oh, and they still call my brother and I to come in and help out when it gets busy because the new owner doesn’t want to hire new people. We help because it’s always his kids calling pleading for help and we don’t want to make it harder on them just because their father doesn’t understand.

  • sorry for the hijack -
50

His name wasn’t Borat, by any chance?

51

Beautiful, LifeOnWry

I’ve never witnessed nor performed one, but I have two good ones.

One of my worst jobs was in a factory where most workers were good people but some workers and the three top managers (general, sales and quality) were the kind of people that make you wish you were a different species. I was hired as a temp to work for the QM; the information I was given was completely misleading, which was strange until I found out the manager of the temp agency was the sister of the general manager’s mistress. QM looks me up and down, smirks and says “let’s see how long you last”. Turns out she made a hobby of pissing people off. It’s been about 8 years and I still hold the record for “assistant who put up with Susie the longest”, 10 1/2 weeks: she’s still pissed that she was never able to make me cry or yell.

The shortest: arrives in the morning, gets the smirk, the insults on her studies and parentage, the yells. At lunchtime Susie tells her she’s not allowed to go out to lunch and she hadn’t brought food. She takes off her labcoat and says “oh yes, I am allowed to go out. I’m just not coming back, you bitch, and (insert string of Spanish epithets describing Susie’s ancestry and lack of mental or emotional capability in minute and careful detail).”

Another one. I got an offer to join a factory, but it was conditional on our passing the medical exam. In Spain, most companies offer a yearly as part of EHS procedures, but it was unusual to have to pass it first, since neither myself nor the other lab girl and the warehouse guy joining at the same time had any known conditions.

Turns out the new warehouse guy (black, immigrant from Equatorial Guinea) was replacing another (immigrant from Morocco) who’d joined a month before and failed the physical. According to one of the Worker’s Representatives (the Spanish concept of union is completely different from the US one), the medical was an excuse and the actual reason the moroccan got fired is that, when he found out the production manager was a woman, he’d said “¡a mí no me da órdenes ninguna puta!” - you know, even if it wasn’t legal grounds for dismissal, I just don’t think that saying you’re not going to take orders from your manager and calling her a whore is an intelligent move.

Anecdote unrelated to the OP: a month after we got hired, there was a general email from corporate headquarters in Philly stating that “we need to be more diverse, we have to hire more blacks and women.” After pondering questions like “here in Spain, wouldn’t that be ‘gypsies and women’, or even ‘moors and women’?” and proposals for “blonde guys and women” someone turned to the lab manager and said “well, our last three hires sure are helping the quotas! Who would’a thought!”

52

This one wasn’t an employee…it was an applicant! He was in my boss’s office interviewing. Suddenly, the voices got very loud and the fuck-you’s were flying. Fisticuffs ensued and the cops were called. Applicant was taken away in handcuffs. It was awesome. I never did find out exactly what set the guy off.

53

There was a grad student who, on the morning he was set to defend his thesis, instead wrote on the blackboard:

Subtle, but it took him probably at least 6 years of grad school to get to that point and then he just imploded and threw it all away. I was impressed.

54

In reference to IT guys

I had to give up most of my weekend once, after a company we supplied IT support for fired their Systems Administrator for Internet Abuse (it was only about a gig of porn, nothing illegal). The site was a power station, and we had to reset passwords on every Admin account and Service account in the environment and turn off all remote access.

Then we had to track and document his activities, including trawling back through his email to discover his abuse of the company digital camera :eek: - and those emails went to a company where his wife worked, but it may or may not not have been his wifes email address :dubious:

I don’t think that he really was going to try anything, but the company was taking no risks, and I was taking the overtime.

That company didn’t have much luck - a replacement hire was tasked with updating the Internet Acceptable Use Policy, but before he finished it, his interest in coprophagia porn caught up with him and he was down the road too - but that was not so much work (much more distasteful when checking his online activities, though).

Si

55

Yeah, this brings up the whole subject of porn at the workplace, something I bet my grandfather never had to deal with. The closest to a meltdown firing we’ve had at my office was when we let a programmer go because of his porn activities.

It wasn’t the porn so much as that he was spending about 7 hours of each working day looking at it and downloading it to his work computer. I had already warned him once, gave him the whole song and dance about “a potential hostile workplace,” yadda yadda yadda, and said that his web activities would be monitored for the next month or so to make sure he complied.

He still couldn’t help himself. The next damn day. When he was confronted, he yelled that he didn’t want to work any place that spied on him anyway, and stormed out.

He had high speed Internet access at home, where he could view and download to his heart’s content. If that doesn’t qualify for porn addiction, I don’t know what does.

56

Nope, not Elves, not tiny humans, what’s inside most modern electronics is a foul-smelling Magic Blue Smoke, the Magic Blue Smoke is wily and tempermental, and is always trying to find ways to escape it’s electronic prison, but it cannot be allowed to escape, if the Magic Blue Smoke escapes, the device no longer works

57

I read a product defect page for a copier yesterday. The line went something like this.

A little smoke and sometimes fire may become visable, due to (their reason here) on the circuit board. Do not be alarmed as it remains contained in the unit and will not spread.

58

I’d say he made the right decision. That place just didn’t sound like the ideal working environment for him. I’m sure he had much better luck at that new position where his perverseness is accepted with open arms and people leave him alone to rub his naughty bits all over his keyboard to his heart’s content from 9 to 5.

59

I’ve witnessed several. When you spend time in the call center industry, you see just about everything.

  • The lady who was repeatedly told that her little boy (5? 6?) could not come to work with her, who was let go because she tried to hide him under her desk all day long? Yeah, she was batshit crazy; we had to call the cops on her, and CPS showed up at the same time, thankfully.

  • The guy who decided that his documented epileptic condition gave him a free pass to grope women and expose himself. We’d already had to physically restrain him in the past because of the epilepsy (now THAT’s a whole barrel of fun, lemme tell ya). When we confronted him about the exposure and whatnot, he started swinging. Me and the rent-a-cop security guard had to step in to keep him from getting at the, as he put it, “lying bitch who set me up”. I walked away with a bloody nose and some bruises, the security guard had a broken finger, and Mr. Exposure was twitching on the pavement outside in front of the cops. Tasers are wonderful things.

  • The girl who apparently heard “you’re fired” as “please change to the graveyard shift”. Of course, her manager and the general manager weren’t around during that shift, and she claimed they’d told her to change her schedule. Since I was the one doing schedules, it only lasted a couple days before I asked the night-shift floor supervisor why the hell so-and-so was clocking time on his shift when she’d been fired almost a week ago? Not so much crazy action this time, but she just Would Not Believe she’d been let go.

  • The guy who thought he was James Bond? He’d decided to work for another company (a competitor); gave his two week, etc, no problems. Two nights after his last work day, security and the facilities guy had to pull him out of the ceiling ducts, where’d he’d gotten stuck. Turns out he’d planned to sneak into the server room and download our call records to give to his new boss, on the apparent assumption that it would be, y’know, useful? Weirdo.

  • The one I particularly enjoyed, though, as the on-duty floor supervisor at the time, I had to be the one to call the cops on her. Dammit. One of our more attractive agents had just got a job at a local strip club. She decided to, um, demonstrate her skill during the night shift on her last day. She left just before the cops arrived, streaking the parking lot in the process. One of the cruisers followed her and her BF, the other stuck around to ‘review the security tapes’ with me and crack jokes. Good times.

  • On a similar note, the girl who was feeling the heat during the summer, so decided that, hey, these cubicles are kinda private, no one will mind if I just take off my top. (She was wearing a bra, but still.) She couldn’t seem to grasp that it was not acceptable attire for the workplace. We let her go for refusing to follow company dress policy. Yes, it’s true: those employee handbooks are so explicit because someone in the past has tried to pull those no-no’s. Sigh.

  • The guy who belatedly discovered that he wasn’t sleeping the drunk off at home, but instead, was at work… naked… on the conference room table… lying in his own puke. The tapes from the previous night show that he’d wandered in while the guard was making rounds. His card key was authorized for 24-hour access (which got SOMEONE in deep trouble down in Facilities, I think); he’d gone straight from the doors to the conference room and bedded down just like he thought he was at home. Crazy stuff.

Oh yeah, I got more. But you get the idea. I tell ya, work is endlessly entertaining if you just know how to look at it correctly. :slight_smile:

60

The "big boss’ (div. manager got fired, where i once worked. We all saw it coming-they guy was a crook 9boasted about padding expense reports, took off for days at a time, was generally unlikeable and VERY unethical). He started yelling and screaming-so they just called the security gaurd, who hustled him out the door! Later learned the guy was fired from a similar position, for embezzlement.