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

In My Humble Opinion
101

An ex-roommate of mine got fired for “improper use of desk spray”. She sprayed it at a co-worker in frustration because this co-worker always made a point of spraying air freshener in her and other co-workers’ direction after they returned from smoke breaks. This was a temp job and the agency phoned her up to say “We don’t think this is working out for you.”

There was a legendary quitting at the Tower Records in the East Village a few years before I started working there (and - you’ll soon see why this is important - before the Immigration Reform and Control Act 1986 which made it very difficult to work under an assumed name). The guy was on the cash register on a busy Saturday. It was nearing the end of his shift. A friend of his came up to buy something. When he handed over the change, he cleared out the entire register. And then walked out with his friend, never to be seen again.

102

Apparently the guy I was hired to replace in a PC tech shop some years was let go because he was using the shiny side of a CD to look up the boss’ wife’s skirt.

I wasn’t there to see it, but it seems the ex-tech decided to leave over the counter and out the front rather than going through the door in the back past the boss.

103

My original plan for after college fell through, so for a about a year I bounced from job to job trying to figure out what to do with my life. I found gainful employment at one of those really large domestic auto dealerships. I started in May as a greenpea, and was actually making good money. I was banking about 1500 dollars a week. Granted I was spending every waking hour at the dealership and busting my ass. About the first of August I’d had a down week for whatever reason, but by that point, I had about 12 grand in the bank. With a car that was paid for, and living at home, I wasn’t worried. So during the Sat. meeting the GM decided he’d make an example of me and try to humiliate me. Let loose with a tirade and then threw an eraser at me. I ducked, then stood up, took my license plate and hurled it at him. “I quit you jack ass.” The license plate stuck in the wall behind him with a thwang and I walked out.

Now, the best firing I ever witnessed was at a small web-based software company I did a project for years ago. Most of their staff were programmers and sales & marketing types. They only had one IT person, and they’d hired me to help her with a networking project so I happened to be there when the following shit went down:

They’d hired a programmer several months earlier and the first clue that something was amiss was that the backups were crapping out. Digging into some logs, it was discovered that this programmer had a really, exceptionally large amount of data being backed up from her PC. A little more digging and it turned out that the programmer had quite a bit of porn stashed on the PC. Now, this was a small enough company, that they weren’t really concerned. The programmer was just told to move any ‘personal’ files to a folder that wasn’t part of the nightly backup.

A week or so later, that same programmer was behind on several deadlines. And there was a recent spike in bandwidth useage at the office. The reason? The porn. It wasn’t that the programmer was downloading and watching porn. Noooo. She was closing her office door and making her own porn with her webcam. IN THE OFFICE! She was dismissed after that, but at least they let her get copies of her files. Apparently the owner wasn’t interested in diversifying the business.

104

I think you’re missing a perfect opportunity to say “Sure, I’d be glad to work” and then of course don’t show. They’d probably call you fire you.

105

:smiley: Yeah, I thought of that after I hung up. The dispatcher would have ‘filled’ the spot with me, and then be left hanging when I didn’t show up.

106

Wow, quite a few interesting stories here!

Mine isn’t quite so spectacular, but I’ll tell it.

My senior year in high school I worked for a large, national pizza chain which still operated as a sit down restaurant too. I was a waitress there.

I was treated like total shit there by the female assistant manager. I was always getting chewed out for some made up infraction and additionally, was chewed out for stuff I never even did because I wasn’t there when it occurred. All the employees agreed she had it out for me.

I had to work all the weekends, which I didn’t mind overly much because tips were better. However, we had to clock out at 2:00 am, whether we were done or not. There were many nights I didn’t get out until after 4:00 am.

They had a really bad habit of constantly changing the schedule without telling you, so I was religious about looking at the schedule at the beginning of my shift, the middle of my shift and before I left. This part is important because it’s why I quit.

Once, I had to have unexpected dental surgery and was in no shape to work the next day. I couldn’t even talk and my face was black and blue. I called in sick, my first time ever doing it that in the year that I had worked there. My asst manager refused to let me call in and told me that I would have to call the other employees to find someone to switch with. I couldn’t even freakin’ talk! I found someone, but good god it took me two hours.

Then there was the time I was bit by a dog on my way to work. I had to walk to work that day and this dog just came running up and bit me…HARD. I was bleeding like you wouldn’t believe. I finished walking to work, told the asst manager what had happened that I needed to go to the hospital for a shot. The blood was soaking through my pants. The bitch wouldn’t let me go. My mother heard about it and came roaring up there and gave the bitch an earful and dragged me off to the hospital.

The final straw though, was the night that I was supposed to attend the Senior Awards Banquet. I was being presented with several awards. I had worked the night before and checked the schedule at the beginning, middle and end of my shift. I was not on the schedule. I had asked for the night off two months before hand and pleased that they had finally honored one of my requests.

At any rate, I was on the way out of the house, when the asst manager called and asked where the hell I was. Yes, she literally said, “Where the hell are you, you’re supposed to be at work”. I told her I wasn’t on the schedule and I had checked when I had clocked out the previous night.

She told me I needed to come in or I would be fired. I was very upset, but was prepared to go in. That’s when my mom ripped the phone out of my hand and talked to her. Finally, the asst mgr said I could go ahead and take the night off, but, I would pay a heavy price. Yes, she said “pay a heavy price”. Believe me, I was mortified that my mother had stepped in, but she had taken time off work to attend the ceremony too.

The next day I walked to work with my clean uniforms folded up, arrived there, laid the uniforms on the counter and told the store manager I was quitting. He called me to the back and tried to talk me out of it, but I told him I had suffered enough abuse. He agreed I had been treated badly, but had never done a thing to rectify it.

Anyway, I told him, nope, I wasn’t coming back and that was that. He told me there was no way I’d find another job at this late date. Hah, within two days I had a job that was Monday through Friday, 7:30 to 4:00 and paid twice as much.

I made sure to come back and let them know that.

107

There’s a link under the picture that will take you to a page with the text. That’s what I originally intended to link to.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/neiltron/3351856161/

108

In honor of Jet Blue flight attendant Steven Slater, I have decided to revive this thread. So share your stories of the spectacular ways you’ve left a job.

109

My job from hell was working at an accounting firm for two bosses who hated each other. I didn’t find out until after I had been at the job for a couple of months that, not only had my predecessor been fired, but so had his predecessor. And the one before that. Bad, bad sign.

Sure enough, after 8 months of toiling, I am put on notice for my job performance and told that if I don’t improve, I will be moved from editor/proofreader down to junior secretary. I totally panicked because I couldn’t see what I was doing wrong. I worked my butt off 40 hours a week (no overtime allowed) and got huge amounts of work done.

One day, I went home and took stock and determined that I was NOT the problem. I filled out an application for a small temporary staffing firm that I had heard good things about. The next day at work, I snuck over to the fax and sent it to the agency. Two hours later, they called with a 7 week exec admin position that paid a buck more an hour than I was making. Heaven.

I walked into the office manager’s office (she was one of my bosses) and said, “You know I am leaving early today to go out of town.” “Yes.” she sneered at me. “I won’t be back. Here’s my office key.” sez I. “But,” she panics, “We have to have an exit interview!” I said, “You just had it.” And I left.

Honest to God, it was one of the best scenes in my life.

110

I was hired by a school to get them accredited. If this was a school, I was the pope. The boss/owner had big dreams but little actual skill. I came on for ~$1200/month because, in his words, once we got accredited we could issue student visas and then we’d all be rolling in the dough. He gave me some fancy title (vice-president or something) and wanted to take me to a seminar in another state. We went together and as I was sitting in the seminar, I realized that his school had absolutely no chance of getting accredited, ever. The night before we left, I bought him a beer and got him to start talking about his life. Apparently, this was his 3rd school (the first two had gone bankrupt) and he always went to his relatives to beg for cash to keep his businesses afloat. The last influx of cash he got he used to buy a van that they never used, and then he tried selling the van for less than half of what he bought it for (apparently he also paid twice as much as the van was worth.) He was getting desperate because all his relatives had cut him off and refused to keep throwing money down the drain. His wife had left him as well and took their children. They had been separate for about 4 years when I met him.

The day we came back, I drafted my two weeks’ notice. However, I didn’t give it to him right away. Another teacher there was working for him for over a year, part time, and the boss owed him $3k. I sat down with the boss and forced him to pay that teacher the back pay he owed. As soon as the money changed hands, I gave him my letter.

111

On a summer job while I was in college a few years back:

I was working in a warehouse driving a forklift. We would pick bulk items which were sent out to the stores., driving through the warehouse in a logical path so heavy items were at the bottom.

Apart, that was the theory. One person went outside during the lunch break at came back quite some time later. Since we didn’t see each other up close that often while we drove through the warehouse, noone noticed that we was completely stoned. He then proceeded to pick up the wrong items in the wrong order and putting them at the wrong place. So somewhere in the warehouse you could find things like 20 packets of light bulbs under 50kg of canned vegetables. Or rather, 400 crushed light bulbs under 50kg of canned vegetables.

We eventually saw this and notified our boss. We did not see him the next day. Since most of us (including him) who were there for the summer worked through a temp agency, we all got a nice “please don’t drive a fork lift under the influence of drugs”-talk.

112

I feel like an asshole saying this, but that was kinda cool.

113

A co-worker who was under investigation for stealing a customer’s money burned up his car while he was in it. Since he lived alone and nobody was interested in his death*, the whole thing was written off as an accident attributed to his throwing a cigar out the window and having it fly back in and set the car on fire.

*In the type of macabre footnote that I love, the funeral home kept calling the office asking for someone to pick up the container with his ashes in it.

114

I witnessed one that caused me to chuckle at the time.

When I was a teen, I worked in my mom’s pottery studeo for a few years, off and on, in summers & after school. It was a sort of mini-factory in my parent’s baseroom, churning out personalized sculptures for the retail gift market. Besides me, she usually hired 2-3 employees. There were lots and lots of bizzare firings over the years …

One she got straight from Art College (OCA, if you are in Toronto). This lady had somewhat elevated notions of what an artist’s working like ought to be like … one day, after working there for a week, she was handed a mop and told to mop the floor (without regular moping, a pottery studeo gets ankle-deep in dust in no time). She mopped for a bit, apparently fuming, and then threw the mop down on the floor, and announced “I shouldn’t have to do this shit! I’M AN ARTIST GODDAMIT!!!”

I laughed, thinking she was joking - I mean, she’d seen the rest of us mopping, so it wasn’t as if she was being singled out - but she wasn’t. She stormed out and never came back. I hope she found an artist job that required no clean-up. :smiley:

Another fellow was fired for opening a kiln while it was firing and putting his hash-pipes in to fire. This was most unsafe!

Another time, my mom got the bright idea of utilizing a government grant that actually paid her to hire certain people - figuring that even the most troublesome mental patient can at least wedge clay and mop. Hint: if the government is paying you to hire someone, there’s a reason. The first one hired under this program worked pretty well for a week, and then locked himself in the basement and refused to come out. The social worker was unable to extract him and the cops had to be summoned.

115

My SO was working for an investment firm. She had a co-worker who had the same job description as her. The only problem is that this chick spent a good part of her workday surfing the net, Facebooking, etc., and not getting the work done. Of course, the work would pile up on her desk and the supervisor would take some of it and assign it to my SO. This occurred because among other things, the co-worker would spend a lot of time kissing ass with the supervisor.

That was all bad enough, but then my SO found out that they were both making the same hourly wage, and worse than that, on wage review, it was my SO that would be interviewed first, run the gambit of justifying what she thought was a fair raise, and the other chick would just get that automatically.

She stewed a little over it for the next year until the next wage review (the wage was pretty good as far as the area she was working in, but the whole job was just a drag, with supervisors that didn’t supervise, and the obvious ass-kissing that was going on), but worked herself into a situation where she had a couple of weeks’ overtime built up, and closer to wage-review time, listed herself with a headhunter and was going to interviews during the workday, but using built up sicktime to not come in for an afternoon, or a couple of hours in the morning, that kind of thing.

By this time, she owed them three weeks’ notice before she could quit the job, and that was fine, because they not only owed her a couple of weeks of overtime, they also owed her three weeks of holiday time. She located a job on a Thursday, which turned out to be the day before the wage review. At the wage review, when they asked her how much of a raise she felt she was entitled to, she quoted a figure of $8000 spread over the next year. The Head of the Department balked, my SO threw her holiday request on the table, and said she was taking holidays the next two weeks, during which time, she expected the department head to get her act together.

While she was on holidays, she was already working her new job. At the end of two weeks, she returned to her old job, was told that she had been turned down for the $8000 raise, and then told them that she was taking all the time they owed her off (two weeks overtime and remaining holiday week), oh, and by the way, she was also giving three weeks notice.

What was hilarious is that the department head even had the company attorney in to see if she could do this, and sure enough, she could, and yes, they even had to pay her regular wage for the three weeks she was taking off.

116

Well… I had a job at K Mart when I was younger. I made it through orientation and the first hour they trained me, then stuck me on a register where I still had no idea what I was doing. It would have been fine; I’d have figured it out, but it was the first Saturday in December so it was super busy. I would have been fine with that too but the customers weren’t satisfied with my speed. For about two hours I was patient and friendly. After that I was sullen and tired. Then some woman was bitching about being in line until Christmas, that she was late for a flight. . .I just lost it. I don’t even remember my exact words (it was 20-odd years ago) but they involved the stupidity of shopping in a busy store during the holiday season when she knew she had a flight to catch. I remember seeing fear in a few customers faces as I took off that stupid “smock” and walked right out the door. I probably said some really nasty things.

Unfortunately I realized when I got outside my purse was still in my locker so I had to slunk back in, listening to the manager bitch the whole way. I never went back for my little three hour paycheck.

When I was a teen I had a co-worker streak across the store and parking lot the day he quit. Don’t know what was up with that. I guess he was feeling free of the stench of Taco Bell.

117

A company I’d been working full-time permanent for as a remote worker (telecommuting NY/MN) decided it was time for me to no longer be their employee. I hadn’t given them reason to fire me and it was sort of against their informal policy to ever lay anyone off. So they just cut off all my access and tried to wait me out, figuring I’d either quit or get pissed off and do something termination-worthy. When I didn’t, they sent this weird informal email that seemed to be suggesting some kind of severance package if I agreed that at this point it didn’t look like I could do any more useful work for them, and when I did so they said that meant I had quit. When I filed for unemployment they told the NYS Dept of Labor I wasn’t entitled to it because I’d quit and I had to go to court and then through the appeals process to get my unemployment benefits.

Story told in more detail here.

118

A waitress where I work called to say she won’t be in for a week or so, her mother had passed away. About a month after she returned to work, her mother called asking to speak to her. She was let go.

119

I used to work at a university convention center part time. Being a state-run operation, more than a few employees knew they couldn’t be fired unless they REALLY fucked up. JR was one such person. Our crew often did his job for him because he would go running to the center director and whine about how he was overworked. All we were supposed to do was set up chairs and tables for meetings, but we often set up sound and lighting too while JR was off somewhere else kissing somebody’s ass.

One day, JR, one of the reservationists, and one of the janitors had vanished. We asked around, and found out the reservationist had been escorted from the building along with all her possessions, and would be arrested if she ever darkened our doorstep again. The higher-ups were tight-lipped about the whole thing, but eventually word started to leak out.

One time we were setting up a room with a stage, lights, and cameras. The director came in to look things over, and somebody said to him “This looks like a setup for a porno film.” He laughed and said “No, we already had one too many of those.” Oh???

We eventually heard that JR, the reservationist, and the janitor were all caught in one of the meeting rooms, doing some 2-on-1 action, and snorting lines of coke off the woman’s back. It might have been just a rumor, but it sounded likely to me, knowing that JR thought he could get away with anything.

120

In the silent film classic The Crowd the main character gets fired but still later attends the company outing, which is a steamboat excursion up the Hudson. I’d always thought that strange, but perhaps back then people weren’t so deeply invested in, and identified with, their jobs as they are today.