Good lord. If we get busted surfing on calls, the worst is that we get our proxy access taken away. 1st offence will net you a 3month proxy block, with the option of getting it back if you meet certain KPIs, 2nd offence is either a longer block, or a permanent block depending on how bad you are and how nice your manager is, but it’s not a firing offence.
Our rules are pretty much the same as yours. One guy in my team got fired for falsifying sick certificates, but that took several weeks to be resolved, so it definitely wasn’t on the spot. I think a physical attack on another rep will get you escorted out the door, but I’m not sure (and not willing to try).
I remember one gal who was escorted out after snorting a bunch of coke in the ladies room, then forgetting to wipe under her nose! Seriously- it was like an SNL skit… :smack:
Another gal was escorted out after multiple allegations of sexual harrassment- and she left screaming obsenities and threats at the guy who had reported her. :eek:
That was a fun place to work!
Now I work for family- I’d have to kill them all to get out of this job!
Oh, lord. Breaking a Bulgarian law, writing lots of mean stuff about Bulgarians in my blog, going to a political rally, publically expressing opinions about Bulgarian politics…all of those would probably get me sent back to the US.
I work at an Internet Data Center. If I pull the wrong connection, it’s possible that transactions involving many, many thousands of dollars could be disrupted. My employer would have to write a check for beaucoup bucks, and I’d be on the street.
Oh, that, and hitting the EPO (Emergency Power Off) switch for the whole building. That would do it, too.
I wonder if they were surprised at all when the ax fell. I have no idea how long it took for the higher ups to notice the videos, but when I got in this morning, there was a corporation wide email explaining how this was a very bad idea and the offenders were going to be fired. An hour later, I heard confirmation from a coworker that the offenders had indeed been fired.
We’ve had two people fired on the spot. The first was a trainee who said to the plant manager that he needed to go home before he punched his supervisor in the face. The PM said “Go home and don’t come back.”
The second was a long-term employee who threw a chair at another employee, striking him. I don’t honestly know if he would have been dismissed on the spot had the chair not hit the other man, but it did and he was.
I’m beginning to think that you can get fired at my job for calling in sick. This is the second time in a month that I’ve heard the owners say “Oh we lost someone today… yeah, she called in sick… I mean, it’s FRIDAY! You don’t DO that.”
And yes, I am looking for a new job. They’re freaky people.
Sad for the kids maybe, but the employees get no sympathy from me.
The nearest I can get to is two employees who got into a fistfight after hours on company property. One ended up with a broken nose, one with a broken arm. I didn’t find out about it until the next morning, but they were both gone and not coming back.
In the vein of what can you do and still not get fired:
One guy famously got caught soliciting an undercover police officer posing as a prostitute in downtown Boston and appeared on the 10 o’clock news in court, wearing his company softball shirt with the company name and logo proudly on the front. He continued to work there for some months afterwards (he wasn’t married or anything, but still).
I’ve heard rumors that someone was caught on the security cameras having sex in their car in the parking lot but I’m not sure I believe that one.
I forgot to add: his appearance on the news was witnessed live by several employees…including the CEO…all of whom immediately recognized him (it was a small company, and this guy had a very distinctive look).
I work for an engineering firm with (chiefly) municipal clients. Anyone can be fired or laid off for incompetence, but that usually becomes evident over time and the process is more gradual. As for the frog march to the front door: stealing from the company is the big sin, as far as I can tell.
Right before I started with the company, there was an engineer who told one of our clients that he could do the job for them cheaper than the company could. After he left the client called the president, and there was a welcoming committee waiting when he got back to the office. He was walked to his office and back out again.
Years later, a vice president knew that he was being phased out, so he held off on having one of his clients sign a fairly substantial consulting fee, knowing that the board wouldn’t get rid of him and risk losing the contract. It actually worked for almost a year, but eventually they tired of the game and wrote off the contract. He was walked out. Sure enough, he immediately bought himself a management position with a competitor, using this contract.
An IT guy was walked out one day, and was rather vocal in his objections on the way out. No one really explained why, but the word going around was that he was assembling and selling computers using parts from company computers. I liked the guy and I’d guess that these were computers that the company was scrapping, but he hadn’t cleared it with anyone so it looked bad.
I help manage a radio station, but we’re a very small company, privately owned. There are some Federal Communications Commission regs, the violation of which would result in dismissal on the spot … deliberately using obscenity on the air, destroying any part of the public file, sabotaging the transmitter, stuff like that. But otherwise, it would take a lot – we’re a pretty collegial group. I was so tired one evening I went home without filing the next day’s program log in the programming computer. At midnight that night we began broadcasting what would be five hours of silence. I was called by the morning jock at 4:30 the next morning, drove in, filed the log (a few keystrokes on a computer) and we were back in business. My boss’ only comment was, “Maybe we need a backup plan, hmm?” and it was forgotten.
Anyway: I work in a cafe, but we hire backpackers on work visas from Eastern Europe, so they get away with a lot. At the moment, they get by on only doing half their job. Doing drugs is a backhand and a booting, messing with the food as well.
Definitely. A coworker in another department was escorted from the building about six months back when she started ranting about a few of her fellow editors and added a comment about “going postal.” Usually we’re not told why employees are fired, but the VP sent out an e-mail reminding us that threats of violence will not be tolerated, even the person is making a bad joke or just blowing off steam.
We had a funky rule about relationships in one place. They were fine, as long as everything was going well. But if you broke up, it had to be amicable, at least at work. If the unhappy bullshit spread to the office and you couldn’t get the message after a couple of quiet words from your supervisor, then both parties were informed that if they couldn’t keep it friendly during business hours, then one person was quitting. The two of you get to decide which one it is. :eek:
