Sorry to hear that. You’re a good egg Winston, sorry that you and your ex-employee are going to have a shitty day/week.
I’m glad I don’t work for you.
There used to be a poster here, Mousemaven or something, who couldn’t find anyone where she worked to accept her resignation - something like the professor who hired her was on sabbatical and was unreachable, his admin assistant didn’t think she had the authority, HR refused to take it etc. For some reason, she thought that meant she was obligated to keep going to work.
Bosses HATE this one simple trick!
I once worked at a company that periodically had rounds of layoffs. One day we were all anticipating another round (the CEO had called a company-wide meeting in the afternoon called “company status”, as he had done previous times when the morning had been filled with letting people go). Towards the end of the day, I ran into the CEO and we had the following conversation:
Leachim: “I could have sworn there was going to be layoffs this morning”.
CEO: “So you didn’t come in this morning?”
Leachim: “No, but would that have worked?”
This was a couple hours ago now. Did he ever show up?
Is that you, Mr. Dithers?
Sounds like he fired himself.
Once I was on vacation when a bunch of people were laid off. Then I got back and everyone (left) in the company got an email saying that the layoffs were over, nobody else had to worry.
Then I got laid off. They didn’t want to get rid of me when I was on vacation, so they waited until I got back…but nobody thought to make sure I didn’t get the “hey, your job is totally safe!” email.
Then I got rehired a week later (with no interruption in pay or senority, so it was a free week’s vacation)…but that’s a long story. 
When a well-liked employee was laid off from our office, the manager wanted to let everyone else know at once before rumors started circulating. He sent an email asking everyone to gather immediately for a brief meeting. In an attempt to boost attendance and promptness he added, “There will be ice cream.”
I’m guessing that nobody ate the ‘bitter pill’ flavoured ice cream.
It’s too bad you weren’t the OP for this thread, then the employee could have come back with the obvious rejoinder: “You can’t fire me, Ike Witt!”
The guy finally showed up right after I posted the OP. I actually fired him for performance-related reasons. It was an extremely unpleasant experience for me, obviously more so for him. He was a terrible employee. Sleeping in the job, always late for important meetings, lazy, arrogant and argumentative. I’m glad that’s over.
I had resolved that if he didn’t show up for the meeting I was going to fire him over the phone. I’m grateful he finally showed up.
I’m shocked, shocked you say this. 
We had a RIF (CEO was ex-Navy) at work, but one girl left early for a Dr appointment. She comes in the next day & her card doesn’t let her thru security to the elevator bank of the tower. She walks to the front desk & talks to the guard, he looks her up, sees her on the list & says something must have happened to her card, so he lets her in. She takes the elevator up to our floor & can’t get out of the lobby but since it’s the time everyone else is coming in, she gets let in. She goes back to her (locked) department, & again, can’t get in the door, but knocks & is let in. She tries to sign on but has issues so she calls the help desk where they tell her, “Oh, you no longer work here.” :eek:
Seems since she left early they did every step in the termination process except notify the employee! :smack:
I’m very glad that I don’t have to deal with hiring or firing people at my work (though I’ve had to do some of both over the years). Something I keep telling the people that do take care of this stuff is to fire them as soon as the problems happen. For example, if we hire someone and they say they can work M-F 8am-3pm, but after two months they tell as they can’t work Monday or Wednesday or Thursday anymore (basically meaning we have to hire another person to do what we hired them to do), just kick them to the curb and be done with it. Instead they’ll work around that for months or years because they don’t want to go through the hassle of hiring another person. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said (in this example) “What, she can’t work these days anymore, show her the application she filled out, point to the part where she specifically said she could work weekday mornings and say ‘if you can’t do this anymore, it’s not going to work out so why don’t you see if you can figure something out’”. But, alas, they never listen to me about this.
This goes for lazy/stupid/“sick” employees as well. If the problem shows up right away, just get rid of them. It’s better than dealing with them for years.
Also, if you give 'em the boot after a few weeks they likely won’t be eligible for unemployment*, but if they’re with us for months or years, they will be.
A)As an employer I have to worry about people going on unemployment, it comes from my reserve fund and the less money that’s in that fund, the higher my rates are. If my rates go up, I have to pass that along to the customer.
B)If I fire someone because they no longer can work the schedule I assign them, even if they agreed to it, they’ll be eligible for unemployment. At least they are if the reason is ‘availability to work’ and the problem is that they took a second job that leaves them unable to work at my store. I’ve had that happen before, but that person knew how to game the UI system. I learned my lesson that day. Got my ass handed to me in UI court.
Durn Republican business owners always stepping on the hearts and dreams of the working-poor slobs under them. We need to unionize so you can’t do things like that! Unless you happen to be a Democrat and then just fire the worthless so-and-so. 
In reality you have my sympathy. Someone offered me what I considered an outrageous sum for my business the week after I had to fire my favorite nephew. I signed the papers and let it all be his headache. Going to sleep knowing Xnumber of families don’t eat if you screw up a decision wasn’t for me.
How do you get fired on your day off?
I knew I’d catch some slack…hence the footnote. I’m pretty lefty, but I was raised in the small business community. The place I work for is my dad’s store, his father had a business, his father’s father had one. I grew up knowing many many business owners so we had a lot of these kinds of discussions. But when I began to work for my dad (at 12 years old), I was tossed into the trenches with the rest of the high school kids. It gave me a somewhat unique insight into “their” side of things, but also a path of communication to the ‘higher ups’ that the regular employees didn’t have. To this day, I still give my dad a lot of ‘that’s not fair’ type feedback.
Having said that, from my side of things, both hearing about it while growing up and seeing it first hand from my POV (even while I was just a ‘regular employee’ but having a different POV), it’s interesting. For example [thinks of example]…an employee will take a delivery out, mess something up, and have to go back and fix it. He’ll get yelled at, especially since it’s probably the 14th time he’s made a similar mistake. I’ll hear things like ‘your dad was really mean to him’ or ‘that was a bunch of bullshit’ or whatever. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, those people will understand when I say 'you have to realize, he took a delivery out, then had to spend another hour to go back and fix it. It costs us an hour of his wages, plus taxes, plus gas and wear and tear on the vehicle…and it all was paid for out of my dad’s pocket, it wasn’t wrong for my dad to be annoyed at him about that. What if I said ‘the next time John does that, you have to give me $15?’ how many times would it take before you flipped out at him?"
Firing someone because they keep fucking up doesn’t make you a republican. It might move the needle a little further to the right as I remind people that my family doesn’t own a business to give people jobs, they own a business to turn a profit. We (well, they) will keep an employee on for as long as they can, but I think it’s because they don’t like firing people. I’ve called for “John” to be fired many times, right from when he started. Not because I’m a righty, but because he’s a moron.
I know your quote above was a joke, but it reminds me of something. A national chain restaurant had closed up a bunch of their locations and one of my bleeding heart liberal FB friends shit all over their facebook page about how many people they put out of work and how they were just doing it for the money blah blah blah. I stayed out of it, but that was a great case of ‘you really don’t understand, do you’. I wanted to explain to her that those locations were probably not making money and if they left them open it probably would have taken the entire business down. Yes, it meant firing a lot of people, but if they had to pump money into locations that weren’t self-sufficient, everyone would have been out of a job. If those locations were making money, don’t you think they would have kept them open? Again, people don’t own businesses just to give people jobs (especially if it means paying them out of their pocket).
As for unions, my store is very small and mostly made up of high school kids so it’s not going to unionize. You can probably guess my position on unions, but I don’t really know enough about them so I sort of stay out of that.
“Boy, is he strict”
/The Waco Kid