Most spectacular way in which you or a coworker has quit or been fired from a job

In My Humble Opinion
61

Total hijack – I’ve heard that if you spend 15 minutes per day writing – not typing – it exercises your entire neurological system and can delay the onset of things like alzheimer’s. No cite though.

I once got a job that was pretty much working on a sales floor with the occasional back room assembly job. I really disliked it and I was no good at it. After being there for three weeks the woman that hired me asked if I’d like to go out for a cup of coffee. We left the store and walked over to McDonald’s, then sat on a park bench for a little “chat.” She explained that I was maybe not a good match for the store and that it would be a good idea if I stopped working there.

One thing she said struck me as pretty dumb. She said that I’d get paid for the whole day no matter what, but I had the option of either working the rest of the day or going home. DUH!

I was really pissed about getting canned and entertained some thoughts of retaliatory vandalism. When I think back on it now, though, I really did suck at that job and the woman that fired me could not possibly have been nicer about it.

62

Sounds like a real-life House! Of course, he would have to have lied to the doctors about having ever left the country, and exhibit lupus-like symptoms that AREN’T LUPUS.

63

Actually, I think this may be the winner. Too bad you can’t give us more details. This sounds wicked hilarious. Did he do this on a bet or something?

64

I’ll bet he did this on something… :stuck_out_tongue:

65

I worked at a bike shop, as the shop manager. One day the store manager got pissed at me for some reason, and told me to go home. I knew I was right, so we got into a huge yelling match. I ended up walking away and went back to work for the rest of the day. Showed up the next morning, and it was like nothing happened.

I’m still not sure if he was firing me or not, if so I guess it didn’t work.

66

At a place I worked some years ago, there was a woman (call her “Jenna”) who was just absoutely smokin’ hot. She had the most amazing body of anyone I’ve ever met. It was actually kind of a shame, because she was also smart and a very talented graphic designer, but nobody took her seriously because she was so ornamental.

Anyway, there was another employee who got caught with a LOT of porn on his computer.

Porn of women with the same kind of body as Jenna.

With Jenna’s actual head Photoshopped onto them.

The powers that be were prepared to settle it quietly without a firing by having the guy swear never to do anything of the sort again, but he inexplicably got all outraged at what he considered an invasion of his privacy!

Um, listen, stupid, first of all it was a company computer, so you had NO expectation of privacy, and second, what about the poor woman you were no doubt spankin’ it to by proxy? What about HER privacy?

He would NOT drop it. The ensuing shouting match:
[ul][li]made it clear to the whole place what he had done (poor Jenna, she was so humiliated), and[/li][li]got him thoroughly fired.[/ul][/li]
What a moron.

67

Hubby DeathLlama got his job because of someone else’s abrupt exit. Now, hubby teaches middle school music–not for the faint of heart, what with having class after class of 35-70 13yros–and the lady before him apparently lacked the capacity to handle it.

She simply left a letter of resignation on her desk and never came back–never telling anyone. Now, the desk is in the music office, tucked away in its own little walled world within the large music room, and it was all but invisible. So, the next day, there were however many dozen pubescents outside the class door, waiting for the teacher to arrive and let them in. As she had not ordered a sub, the office assumed she was coming. They called after a while, but she didn’t answer. Eventually, a sub was found, and eventually, found her letter.

Hubby was hired with 5 weeks to get the kiddos ready for their big spring concert. He pulled it off, and some of the girls were eager to meet me in the audience afterwards (13yro girls loooooove talking to a teacher’s spouse, playing with the babies, etc). There, they told me how their old teacher screamed and cried a lot. I’d gathered.

68

A couple of years ago, we had hired a sixth-grade teacher who seemed nice at first, and I loaned her a lot of stuff to help get her going into the new year, since I was in the next room down. We had teacher meeting promptly at 7:50 in the mornings, and admin. was really hot on everyone being there because of important updates. She would wander in about 8:00 or 8:10, oblivious. The kids complained that she would get off-track and spend hours teaching math, never getting to other subjects, or just let them color for hours because she wasn’t into talking right then. One Friday she showed up late again, and when the principal said something to her after school, she cleaned out her room and walked out. With nearly everything in the room, including everything that I and other teachers had lent her, plus the TV, VCR, DVD, decorations, pens in the drawers, etc. The next weeks were really scrambled as everyone shifted duties to teach the poor kids. I really miss some of the stuff she stole.

69

My stepmother just inspires the hate:

… A partner in her company left. He had a company car, a Jaguar, and wanted to buy it. She said “No” and gave him a firm date/time to have it back - she wanted it for herself. So he paid somebody $1,000 to literally sit in the car for 24 hours and do nothing but smoke in it. Car was pretty much useless to her after that.

… Many, many people have left her company to find competitors. Even me. One person left, took a job as Director of … at her company’s largest client (49% of total revenue) and his first order of business was to yank the work from her and give it to a competitor. Lucky for me, this happened the day after I left for good, taking a similar position at a competitor, whereupon she threatened to sue me. My response: “Suck my ballsack, bitch.”

… Yeah, had plenty of people leave during their first days’ lunch. That’s nothing compared to the contractor who was hired to install a phone system: he got so sick of her that he called the Sheriff where they both went into the office and confiscated all the just-installed equipment, the entire time yelling at the top of his lungs about what a bitch she was, wondering if my father had “it fall off from sticking it in her infested cooze”, and other similar platitudes.

There’s more, a lot more. I could go on for quite a bit on this theme.

70

Well, there’s a few times that are memorable. Let’s see, I was 22 and not too smart at the time. I was working at a cabinet making shop and I ran an automated chopsaw cutting raw lengths of hardwoods. The thing was brand new and cost $800,000. Me and my crew ran it OK but the swingshift were all untrained flying monkeys that had no idea how to run the thing. Lots of wood was wasted. It got to the point where I’d spend half of MY shift (with two other helpers) fixing their fuckups from the night before. Complaints to my manager went unheeded.

One day after spending most of my shift throwing bad wood away that was allegedly supposed to be going through the mill, I disabled the machine so it wouldn’t boot (I edited the autoexec.bat) I left a note saying as much, and I was sick and tired of the waste and I refused to let it happen any more. (I did mention I wasn’t that smart, right?)

The plant manager on the floor didn’t see things my way, and I was fired. I did hear through the grapevine later that the chick I’d been training quit on the spot when she found out what happened. Along with the seasoned lifer they also had forced into running the machine (she HATED it). Did I mention that only two people in the company knew the machine enough to run it with any efficiency? :smiley:
Then there was the time DirecTV closed their DSL division two weeks before Christmas. They gave us an hour to pack up our shit and GTFO. I still regret not stealing on of those sweet Dell workstations on my way out.

71

Got hired at the local paper, temp summer job, pulling newspapers off the press, banding and stacking. I was fired, 3 times. No call no show for two days. I didn’t show up for Tuesday & Wednesday. I showed my schedule to the Manager who was firing me. Those were my days off.
The second time I showed up in his office, he just sighed and told me to go on down there and he would take care of it. The third time, he admitted that the woman in charge down there, was all set to hire some relative of hers, and was firing me to make room. Personal best though, I’ve never heard of someone getting fired 3 times in 4 weeks, from the same job.

72

I worked in retail in a MegaHell for two years.

Those places are a magnet for interesting people.

I worked in the bakery (#2 in sales for the store) which was managed by a hot 50 year bi-polar woman who also managed the Deli (#1 in sales for the store) and the Cheese Wall (#3 in sales). Too big of a job for one manager.

I’m pretty sure if she were given the job of managing the broom cupboard she would have burst into tears on a regular basis, like she did with her own job. She was the reason I quit.

But, this isn’t about her.

It’s about X.

X was retarded or at least very low IQ. He wasn’t Down Syndrome. He wore two hearing aids and had to be the most surly retard I have ever encountered. ( I’ve been in group homes, I have a shirttail relative that is retarded. I’ve worked with them. I’m no expert, but I decided he wasn’t Full Retard pretty early on. There was some issues, but I was so busy trying to work my department with A retard, a life time Special ed student and a geriatric that I didn’t have any time to diagnose his problem.)

X knew he could get away with just about anything and what he would do is punch in at 9am, go to his job and be sent off on an errand and then punch out for lunch 45 minutes later and it would be hours before he would be back in your area again. He would wander the store talking to people or hiding in the two different break rooms. Sometimes taking naps. Then, after maybe three hours of this, he would punch out and go home. He had done this for years. He even had a liscense to drive, which blew my mind.

When he had to work directly with me, I would give him the easiest job to do on a Baking Day. ( Every day was a baking day, but some days were more jammed than others.) His job was to open a box of frozen cookies and count out 24 cookies on a baking sheet and put it on the baking rack. I could do 20-25 sheets in probably 10 minutes without interruption. In 25 minutes I could load up two rolling racks Every sheet he did was wrong and took him all day. ALL DAY. ALL DAY.

I decided his problem wasn’t that he was retarded, but probably very learning disabled at least with numbers. He was playing the system and just pissing off anyone who worked with him. And he was surly most of the time. When I got annoyed at this lack of help ( I am not there to babysit someone, I would send him over to the deli. I usually ended up sending the other special ed girl who was REALLY SLOW over to deli, because I worked twice as fast without her around.) Anyone who was a tard went to the deli, eventually. Our cake decorators (two of them, who were lovely ladies who did help me if I was crammed packed if they weren’t crammed, which was all the time.) use to make bets on how long it would be before X or Y were sent over to the deli because I moved faster without them around.

Anyways. I eventually told my direct supervisor that X and Y were totally useless and don’t schedule them anymore with me. Losing me would suck because she wouldn’t be able to hide in the backroom anymore avoiding her workers. (She caused devestation in every department in every store she worked at for over 23 years.)

So,off to the deli he went, where I would get flipped off from the ladies over there for having to babysit him when he wasn’t wandering the store or punching out after only a 45 min. work day.

Then one day I came in and noticed X wasn’t there. " He punch out after a 15 minute work day or what?"

" He got fired."

“The union allowed this?” says I, knowing the union protected guys like this and yet my complaints about him and the other Special Ed Girl fell on deaf ears.

“Oh I guess falling alseep on a flat top cart in plain view of customers. The manager ( the only manager who actually was a decent fellow in a world of Corporate Tools) fired him on the spot.”

73

This was before my time, so i only know of it through hearsay. Apparently someone in my group took some of the crystals we were growing (which were a spectacular green color) down to a local jeweler’s shop and tried to pass them off as emeralds.
It was unbelievably stupid. The crystals weren’t emeralds, and any competant jeweler would have spoptted the differences immediately – the cleavage planes were all wrong, as was the crystal shape, and its color. Not to mention that the crystal would dissolve in water or alcohol if you tried to clean it.

74

We had a programmer who was ostensibly fired for the same reason, but really, because he was a big, fat, unadulterated idiot.

Everyone knew that the company had spyware on our computers for “quality control.” No big deal, their computers, their rules. However, this guy got caught looking at porn for hours at a time. My boss, a serious Christian, wanted to fire him but I talked him out of it. I told the employee that I didn’t care how much porn he wanted to look at, but he’d have to do it on his own computer at home, and to wipe the porn from his hard drive. Besides taking him away from his work, we absolutely did not want any potential sexual harassment issues. He seemed properly chastened.

A few weeks later, the managers, including me, went to a meeting out of town. Sure enough, the idiot spent the entire day viewing and downloading porn. After he’d been warned. When he knew about the spyware.

After I busted him and told him that he was fired, he holldered about not wanting to work for a company that didn’t trust him anyway, and he started walking back to his workstation.

"We’re are you going?
“Er, just back to to my computer to, er, get a few things.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll take care of it.”
“Hey, I’ve got personal stuff on there.”
“You’re not supposed to.”

After he left, we found about about 30 gigs of porn on his computer, mostly hentai and looks-like-a-minor-but-not-really type. My boss was disgusted with him about the porn, but I was disgusted about his idiocy.

They also busted a tech support guy who spent the same day playing HALO for eight hours after he put the lines on hold.

75

At my last job, I come in one morning to find my boss (a micro-managing bitch who would tell me to do something, then yell at me when I did it) importantly bustling around, going in and out of closed door meetings with the big boss.

She finally calls me into her office, tells me that two of our employees were fighting at work the evening before, that they had both been fired, and I needed to handle changing the security code and getting the locks changed. I was horrified, since I worked at a very small business and knew both of these guys.

She gave me a :dubious: look and said, “You already knew about this, didn’t you?” I assured her I hadn’t, and went to go make my phone calls.

Now I was tight with another co-worker whom she didn’t like at all, some power trip thing. She tried getting me to keep track of when he came into work so she could write him up for being late until Big Boss called her off. It wasn’t until I left that job that I realized she thought I’d faked my reaction. I also got transferred to my previous position (a fricking cake walk, I finished all my work every day before lunch) because the supervisor of that department practically begged me to take it back. My old position with Micro Manager was filled a week later, so Bitch was planning to fire me if I hadn’t moved over.

76

This is the almost exact opposite of spectacular, but I once worked at a place that refused to accept the fact that I had quit.

My job was to go to various other sites and monitor what was going on. On Monday a worker at another site accused me of wrongdoing. I was sent home for the day while the investigation went on. Tuesday morning, I was called back- the investigation found no wrongdoing, so head on out to the site. Two hours later, sent home again for another investigation following another accusation of wrongdoing, by the same worker. Again, no findings, so on Wednesday I was called back to work. Within hours, I got a call that I needed to go home - another accusation. I told the boss “screw it, I can’t work here if I’m going to be sent home to be investigated on a daily basis. Find someone else.”

Thursday morning my boss calls me, saying “the investigation found no wrongoing. You can go back to work.” I said, “Um, maybe you didn’t notice, but I quit yesterday. I’m not going back.” Says my boss, “We really need somebody out there, can’t you just go out there again?” “Um, no, I quit yesterday!”

Friday morning, my boss’ boss calls me. “I’m told that you refused a direct order from your supervisor yesterday. That’s grounds for termination.” I replied, “I quit on Wednesday! You can’t fire me for insubordination when I don’t work for you!” Says she, “Oh, I see. So, when can we expect you at your site? We really really need somebody out there.” I hung up.

Three weeks later the manager of the site calls me, wondering why I only worked two days out of the month when I was expected there the whole month. I told him that I had quit on the third day. “Oh,” he said. “Nobody told me that.” :smack:

77

I think the best was when the head of National Cash Register fired the guy who would found IBM, by having his desk hauled outside and set fire on the lawn.

78

Legendary story at my job:

A driver has a long break. His wife surprises him by showing up at the mall station where he’s taking a break. What a nice surprise! Its late, and they go and hang out inside the bus.

One thing leads to another and they are having crazy sex in the parked bus. In his bliss the driver totally forgets about the schedule and his departure tume comes and goes. He had the second to last schedule that night. The last schedule bus driver is perplexed why it is so crowded on his bus so late at night. All the people waiting for the second-to-last schedule have to resort to taking the last schedule bus. The bus gets full very quickly. That driver feels like something is up (maybe the other bus broke down?) so he calls Control to let them know he is getting bogged down by tons of passengers.

Meanwhile, the other driver finishes having sex with his wife, realizes, “Oh shit! I’m super late!”. However, he is SO late that its already time for him to pull the bus into the yard. Rather than run the schedule horribly late, he simply decides to take the bus back to the yard and pretend like he did his run.

Control is wondering is what is up. They call him (while he is on the freeway, bringing the bus back) and ask where he is. He fibs and says he is finishing up with his route, says he’s somewhere else. Control is suspicious.

So they pull the security tape off the bus to see what the heck was going on, and see the bus driver having crazy hanging-from-the-rafters sex with his girlfriend. The bus driver has to view this with his supervisor and a few other staff in the room, watching the video of the driver having sex with his wife :eek: (talk about embarassing!).

He ended up getting fired, but in a big irony, he got fired because he lied to control not because he was having crazy sex in the bus :stuck_out_tongue:

79

Do you still have the picture?

80

Kinda’ like Dr. Crusher finally “relieving” the mentally compromised Captain Picard of his position AFTER he announced that he was entering the space-cloud thingie.

Some earlier dialog, inexact quotes:

<<Are you [Captain Picard]? >>

<<-and more! >>

<<The more frightens me… >>

<<-and fascinates(?) me! >>

There were several earlier indications that Picard wasn’t quite himself, and could easily end up endagering the ship and its crew. Of course, at these points, Dr. Crusher told Riker and others that she had insufficient evidence to remove Picard from his command.

But I digress…

/ / /

Actually, I was once in a real-life situation that was the reverse of yours, with an incredibly awful “wedge” type alleged “female human being” and alleged “friend.”

Long story short, she could be considerd a casual “employee” of mine because I agreed to let her videotape my niece’s wedding with some money promised upon entering.

I “terminated” her when I realized that she intended to attend in lousy wrinkled garments, and no doubt “sabotage” me in other ways. This of course would have involved sabotaging the wedding as well, but I guess she didn’t care.

Let me ^ get back to this thread on it this evening.