I thought about this after watching Disclosure this afternoon. If you haven’t seen the movie, near the end he is set up to be seen as incompetent and then fired for that reason instead of because of a sexual harassment lawsuit. So it got me thinking, which is the worst reason to be fired from your job? Only including reasons that you are directly responsible for, not just because the company is downsizing or things like that. Worst has to be in terms of which affects you most in the long run, i.e. getting another job, how it affects your reputation, and if it requires legal action. I’ve thought of these reasons that you would be fired, but it you think of more then please add them:
Incompetence
Fraud
Embezzlement
Stealing office supplies (minimal, I know, but still)
Sexual Harassment
Perpetual Lateness
Lying
Insubordination
I haven’t decided myself. Hope to hear some good replies!
-foxy
Worst would be something you weren’t responsible for, but were thought to be.
I worked for a company that had a corporate culture that included scapegoating. At the end of every major project, a person would be found who, usually, had very little to do with the project, but had been around. All blame for anything that had gone wrong would be pinned to this person and they would be fired.
Actually, I suppose the worst reason to lose your job is “no reason.” Barring that, losing your job because the new boss wants his own guy working for him. That’s happened to my father, an engineer, twice.
Well… getting fire for “Needing to get your life together” (the reason cited for my losing my last job) really sucked. I worked there for a month. The manager knew next to nothing about me, and I was giving 110% when I was there.
I got fired for going fishing once. And thats what they put on my termination slip. Saved it for years, was gonna frame it. The best part was I caught a big fish (100+lb halibut) and I had to take care of it so in actuality, I should have been fired for MIA. Upon returning to the job the big boss #2 who fired me asked where I got the big fish? I told him if he wanted to know, he never should have fired me!
He was so P’Od that he ordered a helicopter to get me the hell out of there.
no matter how good i am at what i do, i’ve lost a lot of business and projects because i’ve been “too young”. Apparently being 22 automatically disqualifies me from being competent at my work in some people’s opinion - no matter how much evidence i present them with to the contrary.
Sorry to burst the bubble, but he was a she. It was a card shop at the mall with no males whatsoever working there that I ever heard of. I think guys have an allergy to card shops or something. So many of them came in looking bewildered and asking for advice on Christmas presents.
I got fired once. The person who fired me was the manager and she actually admitted it was either her or me and while it should have been her, it wasn’t going to be her.
The worst one that happened to me in real life was when I was working as a surveyor’s assistant, and one morning was called into the boss’s office along with the surveyor, and was accused of having deliberately tapped on the spike between measurements in order to ruin the survey and thereby stretch out my job (i.e., theoretically I was thinking that they’d have to go back and do it over again?). The surveyor claimed to have seen me do it. The boss yelled at me and fired me and was very abusive. It was a small town, too, so I figured “There goes any likelihood of me ever getting another job around here”.
Get real?!@ The surveyor saw me doing it and knew it would screw up his elevation parameters (he would not come in to the distant point of known elevation with a reading within the margin of error for that point), but didn’t say or do anything about it at the time? How @#%! likely is that? He’s gonna finish the run, come up with the wrong numbers, and only then say to the boss, “Oh, that guy you hired who holds the pole and sets the spike between measurements, uh, I saw him tap on it with his foot between takes”?? How about maybe it had something to do with the 4-beer lunch the surveyor drank every afternoon in the field?
Adjunct college faculty can lose their class assignments, or simply not receive any, for the following reasons: a full timer needs to take your class to make a full time load; the class didn’t have enough students in it; there was budget cutting.
What’s worse is not being assigned a class and being given no reason at all, even after years of good work, good evaluations, etc. This happens on a regular basis. It hasn’t happened to me very often, but it’s pretty bad when it does. I’d rather be told that I suck, or they don’t like my hair color, or anything, rather than be given no explanation.
My old secretary got fired for reading “The Onion” at work - some article about “Guys keep sucking my dick” or whatever as the headline, and his boss (not me) happened to walk up behind him, assumed it was porn, and fired him. (FWIW, he was a bit of a slacker, and that was probably just the last straw.)
I got fired a few months later for having two deaths in my family (sister and sister in law) within three weeks, having to fly back east for both funerals, and my supervisors decided that I was probably going to be too emotionally fragile to do my work. I wasn’t too emotionally fragile to file suit against them for that, though. (They settled out of court.)
Considering what it did to his reputation at school, the worst was probably a kid I knew who got fired when a customer caught him masturbating in the back room. It didn’t help that he worked in food prep.
For me? My manager came up to me and started talking about his big plans for our department and how he was going to make it more independent by hiring our own graphic designer, our own web designer, etc. Best of all, he’d run it by the president already and gotten the whole thing approved so he could start right away. When I told him that sounded great, he dropped the bomb: “Unfortunately, [the prez] said he can’t expand our budget to bring in new people, so from now on, your job and the other writers’ jobs are going to be done by freelancers in order to make room. Sorry.”
