My last job was funny about giving notice. I went to work for one of our vendors and stayed my two weeks so I could train a replacement. If somebody gave notice that they were going to work for another shop, boom out the door.
I worked at a Spencer Gifts one summer. Two of my managers were sacked when some suits from the regional office showed up and did some investigating–apparently, the “shrinkage” our store had been experiencing was due to our managers’ stealing stuff. They’d taken a lot of jewelry, I guess, and either just stolen it or wrote it down on the “return log” under fake addresses. They weren’t marched out as much as they ran out crying, but I never saw them again, and we got a really cool new head manager.
Now I work in medical research, so stealing drugs, grossly violating confidentiaility on purpose, or getting into an altercation with a patient would probably get me let go on the spot.
This isn’t really my story, but my boyfriend’s. He used to work at this nursing home, and you know those pain relief patches they stick on the elderly when they can’t swallow pills? Some girl got fired on the spot because it was discovered she was stealing them off the old people…and eating them.
At the daycamp where I spend my summers I have actually only seen two people fired. It seems like very little considering the fact that the counselors are slightly reckless.
(1) A counselor was fired for showing up hung over. This one surprised me somewhat because at some sites counselors have come to work high and received no disciplinary action.
(2) Another counselor was fired for repeated contact with a camper outside of camp. In other words, he gave her rides to and from various places around town and called her cell phone at 2 am on several occassions. Not a good move when you work with 14 year olds.
Short of exhibiting some random and extreme form of violence, I do not think you could be fired from my officiating job. I dont know…maybe sex on the field during a game or something but I really cannot think of anything else.
Really…not much.
If you’re in the doghouse you’re in trouble as pretty much ANYTHING could and has been used as an excuse to let someone go. However if you’re a good employee you’re pretty safe.
One thing I forgot is the locked room. The locked room is kept locked, as it holds all the accounting stuff–some of the checkbooks (the really large accounts are kept upstairs) and bank statements locked in drawers plus the computer with all the accoutning software. Alas, the computer has to have an Internet connection for tax purposes.
Only the Big Bosses and I know where the keys to the locked room are. If anyone is ever caught on the locked room’s computer, their ass is in the street. The two people who have done this should be grateful I didn’t smash them through the glass door.
I would imagine being caught on To Catch a Predator on Dateline would be a fast track to early involuntary retirement.
A guy in my workplace was dramatically fired this week because he emailed me about his personal problems. This guy had already been on notice about the inappropriateness of this kind of activity, but I guess the warning didn’t stick.
What was odd was that I was complaining to the boss about another matter when I casually mentioned the email. It was the email, not the other matter (which IMHO was more serious) that made my boss decide to fire the employee.
The whole thing has left me feeling guilty (for irrational reasons…since I know I didn’t do anything wrong) but at least I have learned one thing. If the boss tells you not to do something and you do it anyway, don’t be shocked when you get hauled out of the office.
Anything that brings in a Federal Marshal. Don’t screw with the mail and don’t play practical jokes that could be construed as a terrorist act (powder in an envelope).
Having sex at work (they already know what the definition of IS is).
Blatant Verbally/physical/sexually harassment.
I once saw a divisional head getting escorted unwillingly from the building by the Finance Director. Plenty of harsh language and pushing and shoving by both parties. It emerged later on that he’d been using his expense account to wine and dine escort girls, rather than the clients he was supposed to be entertaining!
Another place I worked someone got escorted from the building by the police - they’d been using work email to organise drug deals, which is just all kinds of stupid. IIRC she never got charged with anything because a search of her house turned up nothing. Still got sacked though.
Very little will get you fired immediately from where I work. Even the guy who got busted smuggling drugs into Singapore didn’t get fired until the sentence was given.
The sexual stuff mentioned already will probably just get you laughed at. The applicant who emailed nude pictures of himself to our VP didn’t get hired, but had he already been working here, he probably would have just been ridiculed until he quit (as it was she forwarded the photos to everyone to make fun of).
What will get you fired on short notice is deliberately embarrassing the company or its clients. This was demonstrated recently by a group in our Singapore office who decided to start a blog about how much they hated one of their Japanese co-workers. Aside from the obvious problems with this, several of them pasted entire emails from work, incuding the name of our company, the names of our clients, the products we were working on, and the email addresses of the client representatives we worked with. This info was then peppered with in-depth criticisms like “look what that fucking jap cunt did today!”
Once it was discovered (another employee found it when she Googled a product we’d been working on. “oh hey, one of the hits mentions our company…:eek:”), heads went on pikes and asses went on sidewalks. Five people gone in one sweep.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Beware of Doug
3. Failure to dangle while wearing high heels.
Hee, hee. As a red-blooded American male, I get this.
If you are an attractive female with nice legs, AND wearing high heels, you MUST sit on the edge of the desk and dangle your feet.
making unauthorised copies of database information and/or making unauthorised changes to any of the databases would guarantee me to be booted from my place of work, as the information we handle relates to schools, and if anything goes wrong especially on my part, it can be enough to bring some schools to a grinding halt.
Ending every sentence with the word “Motherfucker”.
“Hmm… yep Tuesday would be fine for me, Motherfucker.”
Wouldn’t even do that in a dream I was having!
Where I worked, only one thing would get an Exempt employee fired immediately - violence in the workplace. Two employees arguing over leaving food in the microwave in the breakroom were fired after one slapped the other, and we had a long-lasting feud because one woman was fired after brandishing a taser, but the person she was talking to wasn’t fired for threatening to jump her on the way to the parking lot (which is why she showed her the taser).
For management, it was sheer whimsy by the superiors. One guy was fired for rudely criticizing the director’s new training plan during a meeting (he basically called her stupid in front of everyone). After a rant by the bosses about large dollar accounting errors in a meeting, a manager who’d been with us 10 years was fired for making a one cent mistake later in the month to “show they were serious.”
What if you said to a past company " I liked working there but this is better " . Would they fire you for a complement?
I also work in academia. The only think I think of that got someone with tenure immediately fired was several years ago one of our faculty threw a lead crystal ashtray at her soon-to-be ex-husband, missed him, but did strike a distinguished (and very generous about donating) alumnus. I did not see the incident, but according to coworkers that did, one dean some other professors swooped down on the woman like a SWAT team and carried her off. Outside of tenured faculty, the only thing that I can think of that lead to immediate firing were student workers we have caught having sex in the library stacks.
In theory, at my last job, a security violation would get you canned, if not jailed. We all held pretty high security clearances and had access to some spooky stuff. However, in reality, it depended upon who you were. In-house politics were pretty strong.
Also in theory, time card fraud would be right up there, yet I knew someone who merely got some time off without pay, plus they removed him from his supervisory slot and made him a peon again. No pay cut, just a title change.
I’m in a temp job right now, and I’m not sure what it would take. I just go in, do my stuff, and leave.
When I was a young lawyer I worked at a big firm during August when the partners were on vacation. Two of the staff members took it upon themselves to leave the premises during lunch hour (okay so far) and tried to beat up a third, who was, unsurprisingly, not cool with it. They confessed. I fired them on the spot. Even though I was a junior associate without the authority to do that. It stuck, and I never got in trouble for it. Can’t remember why the police weren’t called.