We hired a contractor a couple weeks ago. After 2 1/2 days of little work, many misogynistic comments and generally being a borish lazy arse, we let the guy go in the middle of the day. He left quiety, and it seemed that was it. Except it wasn’t. The guy called the manager he’d reported to and made some pretty ominous threats, and late that night the company van was trashed and some windows in the building were broken. The guy made another phone call to the manager the next morning, but it sounded like gibberish/nonsense. We got the cops involved, and it turns out the guy has a rap sheet a mile long, including many many instances of violence in the workplace and some resisting arrest/assaulting an officer convictions. We had an armed security guy out front for two weeks, and the local PD assigned a plain clothes officer to patrol our property.
The guy was arrested, but I guess he’s out on bail now. I’m not worried, though. I never even met the guy.
I’ve never seen any of these but I can tell you what I’ve heard.
1.) Someone at my place of business was fired for theft (thousands upon thousands) and they attempted to assault a manger when discovered.
2.)Someone had a key to the shipping doors (which they were not supposed to duplicate) and came back after being terminated to load their truck with as much beer and potato chips as they could get. Too bad he pulled the truck damn near into the building. His plate was extremely visible in the camera.
3.) On more than one occasion, someone has been fired and attempted to steal a handicap cart in the middle of the night. I’ve known of 4 attempts at this but none have been successful. One kid made it over a mile down the road when a fine member of our local police department picked him up, drunk!
4.) Someone quit because they wouldn’t let him clean the bathroom(actually, he wasn’t going to clean the bathrooms as much as he would go smoke and chew tobacco in there). When he came back to get his job, the managers told him to get out. He then proceeded down to the checkout area of the store and yell at our customers about his problem. Crying and begging for their help. Security had a field day with this guy.
Just some of the fun here at the grocery store.
Guy I knew at work who was a creative director (“K”) had to fire one of his employees (“R”) back in the early 80’s, before this company had really gotten the whole HR thing down with an HR rep to witness the proceedings to take notes, etc. It was K’s first time having to do this and called R into his office and shut the door. K lays out why R was being fired. R was sitting across from K’s desk, in front of table filled with work samples.
R suddenly leans back, knocks the table over, R falls out of the chair onto the floor and says in a loud voice that can be heard outside the office all through the bay “DON’T HIT ME AGAIN K, PLEASE DON’T HIT ME AGAIN”. K was totally stunned. Someone in the bay called security and after much conversation with many higher ups in the company, R was escorted out. K was an extremely gentle man and everyone knew R was total whack job, but it sure created an uproar. After that, new policies came down about how to handle HR situations.
Well, my monitor has gnomes. Printers have elves, each fax machine has a single grouchy sprite, and copiers have little tiny people. While they all do need a good manicure, her big mistake was not starting with an orange-stick.
A few years back at my first “real” job at a big high-tech company, said company had a series of inter-office email discussion lists (this was 1989 so it wasn’t that common, and this was a big enough company that we had employees all over the world). This lady got hired as a contract admin aide and showed up on a couple of the discussion lists, including one for “social issues.” She was a hardcore Ayn Randroid (and I do mean hardcore–I’m something of an objectivist myself, and this woman scared me!) who would beat people over the head (figuratively speaking) with Rand philosophy and get into email screaming matches with people who didn’t agree with her. The funny thing is, when she started she sounded semi-reasonable, so I started to get in some discussions with her, but when she showed her true colors and I bailed out, she turned on me as some kind of traitor to the cause and cussed me out pretty much whenever she got the chance.
Even funnier was that she worked at my physical location, but it was big enough that we never saw each other (I avoided her, as I was convinced by that point that she was a potentially dangerous nutjob). The first and only time I saw her, she was being escorted off the campus by security. She looked more than a little bit like “Mimi” from the Drew Carey show–large woman, little-girlish blonde hairdo with a giant black velvet bow, a pink suit that clashed horribly with her dye job, and waaaayyy too much makeup. She scared me. I was glad she left before we ended up having the inevitable confrontation, because I know I would have said something sarcastic to her and she’d have clocked me.
At the BBQ restaurant I worked at we had hired a new guy and he had just finished his training. He came in for work at about four and already appeared to be drunk. The managers were going to wait it out and see what his behavior would be. Wow, they were in for a show. In the middle of his opening sidework he started chugging 32 oz cups of wine like they were water. Our GM told him to go home, but instead he just walked a couple of stores down in the shopping center and sat behind one of the columns. He stayed there for a while then I looked over and didn’t see him at first. Then I noticed he was still there, but the only part of him I could see was a sprawled out arm sticking out from behind the column. We had to call the cops and the paramedics to come get him. He resisted them at first, and almost fell in the fountain before finally giving up.
All of this was in the dinner rush. To top it off he was still in his uniform. That was fun to explain to the customers.
There was a guy in a building that I worked at that was fired. I was outside when it happened. Luckily, up against the building. Because he threw a monitor out of a 14th floor window.
Then my coworker at another job. A sys admin. Who left behind software timebombs, taking down the email server for a week and crashing the primary file servers.
I’m confused. A person flips a desk over and this is an event you can sue over?
Or are you leaving something out, like the desk flipped over the boss and injured him?
Finance director at one place I worked left in a bit of a huff … he sent an email to everyone in the company, berating the other directors for their lack of vision, paucity of business acumen, and general uselessness. It was quite a nice piece of sustained invective … wish I’d kept a copy for when I left.
There was the ‘blood & guts’ manager at one of my first jobs. He was cheating on his wife with a girl from collections at Ford (she had told me all this after many drinks at an office Christmas party.) He was fired for embezzlement; he was stealing to pay for two lifestyles…GF’s rent & wife / kids mortgage at home.
Somehow, he was tipped off, and he took off with the Ford girl, taking his assigned company car with him! Yes, he dumped his wife & kids and drove away with his GF in a stolen car. There were police reports and (supposedly) bounties offered to repo men to find that car, but it never showed up. About a year later, they found his corpse near Baltimore. Its believed that the car had been towed and ‘compacted’ earlier that year by Baltimore PD.
The ones I witnessed had the hostility coming from the management side. This was at a dotcom in the late 90s. The venture capitalist had recently removed the company president and promoted the VP of sales to be the new president. She immediately began reorganizing the company to her liking. A guy who had been reorganized out of his position gave two weeks notice to his supervisor. When the new president found out, she came down to his cubicle with the teary “how can you do this to us? You’re so critical” bit.
“My deal was to stay in that position until the project was complete. The project was reorganized out of existence.”
“Well, your deal was with the previous management. Not me. So I didn’t break the deal.”
It escalated into the company was missing sales projections, which wouldn’t have happened if his project had been better run.
His response:" Wouldn’t missing sales projections be a problem with the sales department?"
She immediately blew up and started screaming at him to clean out his desk on the spot, don’t bother coming in the last two weeks, GET OUT NOW!!!
My boss tried to calm her down. She fired him too.
Needless to say, my resume was out the door that evening, and I was at another compnay within a few weeks.
What a whack job! What happened to the company? If it becomes devoid f staff so quickly would the venture capitalists move to replace to new president as quickly as possible?
Sheesh, my story is pretty bland compared to most of the ones posted here. Back when I was a college sophomore, I worked in the Payless at the local mall. My manager was pretty cool, but one employee, “Lucy,” hated the manager’s guts. This was partly because the manager expected her to do actual work and partly because the manager wouldn’t let her bring her 4-year-old daughter to work.
Despite repeatedly being told that we weren’t a day care center, Lucy brought her daughter to work one Saturday. Lucy and the manager had words over that. When the manager reviewed the next week’s schedule with me later that day and informed me that I’d be working with Lucy the following weekend, the daughter (who was laying in one of the aisles with a coloring book) piped up and said “Uh-uh! Mommy’s quitting!” So it came as no surprise to either of us when Lucy threw her keys at me the next day and stormed out. Rumor has it that she was extremely pissed when the manager refused to cash her final paycheck out of the register the following week.
There haven’t been any spectacular flameouts at my current job, but we did have one employee who was let go under questionable circumstances. She had gotten involved with some paranormal research group around the time of her departure. One of the VPs sent out a company-wide e-mail a few weeks later warning us that this woman had been trying to get back into the building, and that we shouldn’t let her in under any circumstances. Apparently she believed that ghosts were trying to contact her and she felt she needed to get someplace safe. I never heard what happened to her after that.
I was waiting in a Philosophy Dept. office when an ABD (all but dissertation) grad student came in to deliver her dissertation to her advisor, who promptly refused to accept it, on the grounds that the whole thing was handwritten. The student (a woman who looked to be about forty-five) took umbrage with this, claiming, in a voice that rapidly escalated in volume, pitch and desperation, that it was a valid dissertation nonetheless, that she wasn’t about to type* the damn thing, that it was perfectly readable, that she had rights and couldn’t be singled out like this, and finally shrieking that he was an asshole. Her poor professor (who may very well have been an asshole, if not on this occasion) was perfectly flummoxed, gesturing emptily with his hands and entreating her to be reasonable. She, being safely beyond reason and quite possibly beyond good and evil in the legal sense, refused to take her work back and left in a huff without it.
That must’ve been the most exciting thing to happen in that office for a long time.
*This was in the fall of '86, at the dawn of the PC revolution, and most people were still using typewriters. As if putting together a presentable doctoral dissertation isn’t a formidable enough challenge with a modern PC…
After reading this thread, I’m reminded of the scene from the Simpsons when Ned Flanders checks himself into a mental hospital after going berserk, and the orderlies ask him, “So, how do you want to go to your room, quietly or kicking and screaming?”
And Ned says, “Well, so long as I’m here, I guess it should be kicking and screaming …” And he proceeds to scream and struggle as they drag him down the hall …
:dubious: 