On another message board I read there’s a thread about people quitting their job, and bad management is a recurrent theme. So I’d like stories about when your manager got fired.
I have no direct experience myself of this. The nearest I came was when an ex-manager was fired for theft.
A manager at my office bit one of his subordinates and hassled others, among other weirdness. He was placed on administrative leave during the investigation and then quietly fired. He didn’t go gently; he applied for unemployment out of spite and when he was denied, insisted in every hearing he was entitled to just to fuck with the people who were still there. I have no idea what he’s doing now.
Sadly, all of the managers I know who should have gotten fired were promoted instead. Like the guy who used to let people bring in donuts so they didn’t lose pay when coming in late. We had EIGHT DOZEN donuts one day!! And that ass of a boss moved way up in the organization.
Or the one who was caught falsifying his time cards - they just gave him 2 months suspended without pay, then let him come back in a non-boss role. Had I tried that, I’d have been gone.
Then again, I worked for the gummint - they take care of their own, don’t they?
She wasn’t the boss of me, but she acted like it all the time. She did have a lot of seniority and was considered the go to person in the workroom, might as well be the boss. Passive aggressive, tattle tale, ass kisser, micromanager to the nth degree, all around dragon lady. She would try to get a rise by readjusting equipoment i used, she would insinuate that missing items were my fault, but then turn around and act like we were besties. I would blow her off and just work smarter around her not get pulled into her drama.
Until one day i had enough and called her on something smarmy and rude she said to me.I asked to speak to her in private to clear the air.
She flipped out, refused my request, said her union rep would hear about this and that she didn’t have to speak to me about anything. I nearly flipped out on her, said okay it’ll be me you and the director next time we speak it’ll be a real sit down and i won’t hold back.
So i lodged a complaint, kept it simple to the point. Unbeknownst to me, it was dragon lady’s third strike - she, who sent countless others before me packing, was the target of multiple harassment complaints. So the result of the investigation, interviews and meetings with union counsel did indeed find that she was creating a hostile work environment, they fired her and prevented her from returning to work to save face as she insisted on doing. it was a ding dong the witch is dead celebration
I was working as a department head for a small organization in FL. The Director of the organization was an overbearing, micromanaging megalomaniac subject to fits of verbal abuse. He hired a woman who moved from NY, painting a rosy picture of the organization. Within two weeks she realized the truth and began job hunting, something I was already doing. We gave notice the same week, and the look in his face when I tendered mine was brilliant. I came back for my last check a week after my end date, to find out he had been fired that day. Everyone was thrilled, except for the woman he was having an affair with.
Did I mention the wife with breast cancer and 2 kids back in GA?
Probably the strongest moment of shaudenfreud in my life. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy
I had a boss once who had a history of making offensive racist and sexist remarks. And he had been getting away with it for years.
Until one time when he said something stupid to the wrong person; somebody who had some unexpected connections. This person filed a complaint and was able to get a formal investigation launched.
And that broke the dam. The guy would have survived if it had just been the one remark that started the investigation. But once it was started, a couple dozen other people testified about a bunch of his past remarks.
He wasn’t officially fired. But he was suspended, fined, and demoted about five levels. He resigned within a few months.
I had a good one come and go. He only lasted two weeks. He was jovial, friendly, fair, and damn nice. In an effort to learn his way around the shop, he spent a day with me, so I could teach him all about what I did. And he’d actually pitch in and help.
Alas, higher management had wanted someone with more experience, and when it became obvious he was learning the ropes, they let him go.
Replaced him with a cowardly, tale-telling, ass-covering, abusive shit. Ain’t that the American way?
Some years ago, Mrs. Nott worked for a medium-sized museum. One of the org’s middle managers was a jerk to the women in the office. He did a lot of gender-based, lewd barbed humor to them, and he badgered them about their work. He didn’t treat the men the same way. The woman who got the worst of it (not Mrs. Nott) filed a harassment complaint with the foundation that funds the museum or the EEOC-like state agency. The museum suspended him (legally the safest way to handle it,) and an employment-law lawyer came in to interview the people in the office about him. Most of them said the same thing, and the jerk was shown the door. To protect the museum’s “image,” he was “fired for a different reason.”
The jerk’s biggest mistake was to harass the H.R. woman.:smack:
Unfortunately, instead of hiring somebody to replace him, the boss assigned all of Mr. Jerk’s workload to Mrs. Nott, in addition to her own work.
When I was working for Home Depot my store manager promoted into a higher position. He was replaced by a guy that was incompetent on every level, he ran around barking orders without having any clue what he was doing. It turned out his father was a major shareholder, the district managers where afraid to fire him so he just got transferred from one store to the next, apparently it was our turn. We suffered through this idiot for about 6 months. Upper management politics resulted in his father selling off his shares and retiring. Within a few days of that the DM canned the shitty manager for gross incompetence.
I had a manager in VA that blocked my promotion based on my sexuality then tried to block me from transferring to another store. I ended up leaving VA six months earlier than my partner who was there for school. The HR in MA would not let him block my transfer out of state. After I left a year later I learned that manager had been fired due to excessive charitable donations to his own church.
I worked for a guy that got fired twice, by the same guy. He was fired by his boss at another company, then came to my company, where he hired me. Then his old boss was hired as his new boss at my company, and he fired him again. Sucks to be him.
I found out that my boss was conducting several large scale frauds. Forging signatures on contracts, doctoring up commission and bonus statements. I took it to his boss, who didn’t want to hear about it. I was relatively new and he’d been around for twenty years, was very popular and considered to be a future leader of the company. I took my evidence to Internal Audit and waited to be fired. On my birthday as the staff was pouring into the conference room for the cake and coffee, I could see behind them as VP of HR and head of corporate security escorting him out of the office.
Fire rained on my head from everyone in our division. I was reassigned to a corporate finance job and relocated. Turned out to be a good move for me in the long run, but boy was it uncomfortable for a while.
I was responsible for a guy be fired 3 times. First time he was working for Home Depot. He was a spotting for a reach truck. His job was to make sure no one entered the isle opposite the pallet being taken down. He went into that isle himself and was injured when the reach truck knocked an air compressor down, he was lucky and only got a broken arm. As the district lift truck trainer my instructions where to write him up on the safety violation. It turned out that was a final write up for him.
Next store I transferred into he was working as a vendor rep for the molding supplier. Part of our vendor contract was the rep would stock the shelves when new orders came in. He kept leaving that work for the store employees. I called the vendor to complain, it was a reoccurring complaint and they fired him.
Later in the same store he showed up as a vendor rep for the hardware supplier. I was in operations at that point. That vendor was unique in that they could check in their own orders. I found he was checking items not received as received. I had loss prevention boot him from the store. The supplier fired him.
Ran into him a few stores later. He was once again a vendor rep. Before I did anything I was called to HR. He claimed I had sexually harassed him and grabbed his ass. He named a witness and where it occurred. The witness didn’t confirm his story. And we had never been in the location together. I don’t know how his company handled it. I never ran into him again. Years later I was told he blames me for ruining his life.
I got turned down for a job that I was assuredly the highest qualified for in place of a friend of the supervisor. He was later fired and rumor has it he threatened people over it.
I was a technical training instructor in the US Air Force. They transferred in a new supervisor/instructor. He didn’t seem to be the brightest bulb, but his student course critiques said that he was OK. We’d heard through the grapevine that some students didn’t like his teaching style. One day I needed something out of his classroom and noticed student critiques in the garbage can. They were trashing him badly. I looked at the critiques in the course folder and they said he was OK. That’s when I notices that the J’s on the critique looks funny. My boss’s J’s looked like 3’s. I went back a few classes and he’d been forging the critiques!
I called my boss’s boss who was stationed at another base 600 miles away and told him. To be honest we’d all been carrying the boss as he was screwing up a lot of different stuff. They came up to visit us a couple of days later and kicked him out of instructor duty. He was due to retire from the military soon anyway so they let him do so.
I’ve mentioned before that I worked in a convenience store in West Texas. I actually worked twice. The first time I was let go after just a couple of months due to an audit showing the store coming up short on inventory. They flat-out said they didn’t think it was my fault, but the company policy for this scenario was to fire the newest employee, and that was me. Shortly after I got fired, they caught the guy who fired me stealing! It was him all along. I didn’t go back to work for them right away, but they did take me back a year or two later when I needed a job again.
Anecdote One:
Let’s call my boss Barb. Barb was a nice person who had been with the company almost 20 years. Slightly odd, but apparently effective. I heard she’d received the highest possible performance ratings for many years running. Barb had taken over my team shortly before hiring me. From the start, I could tell Barb was in the wrong role. She just did not understand the subject matter (information security) well enough.
Barb’s boss was “Gail”, an incompetent, abusive, arrogant harridan. Gail gave poor direction and yelled when no one understood what she wanted. Like Barb, Gail didn’t know shit about information security, but unlike Barb, Gail didn’t realize she was in over her head.
Things went down the tube fast. HR interviewed a bunch of people on the team, including me. I did my best to blame Gail for the failure of our team.
I suppose the company could have taken one of two paths. They could have recognized that Barb was a valuable employee who was put in the wrong role and found a new place for her (this was a massive company; they could have moved her somewhere). Or, they could just cashier her. The path they took is left as an exercise for the reader.
Anecdote Two:
I will just say that if you are the CIO of a university, and you are buying a security solution the university doesn’t really need, and you are a part owner of the company that makes that solution, and you promote that solution without disclosing your ownership stake, and furthermore you ignore your information security guy’s recommendations and force him to shill for you… well, if all those things are true, don’t be terribly surprised when that guy quits and submits anonymous complaints about you until you get fired.
When I was going to school, I was the senior Night Auditor at a mid-size hotel. I answered to the Comptroller, who didn’t even answer to the GM. Anyway, we had a ASM who could be best described as “…leaving a trail of slime wherever he goes…”. It took a while, but the orders came down to start papering a file on him. Since he turned the hotel over to me for six hours every night, I was in on the deal. Turns out my input was superfluous, the idiot decided to dip his wick in the bar waitresses.
The virgin he picked shortly thereafter came down with herpes. It was one of the first cases that used DNA to prove the source. I heard the settlement took most of the hotel’s profit for a year.
Mine’s a slightly different kind of fired boss story.
One summer during college I was an intern at the Office for Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention in Washington, where I became friends with Margie, the woman who supervised me, and that led to a paid summer job the next year with an OJJDP project in Boston. I got along well with my boss, “Jim,” who seemed like a decent guy.
Anyway, a year or two later I found out from Margie that Jim had subsequently been fired. She told me all the gruesome details. I no longer recall them, but essentially Jim got a really raw deal - as a result of some political infighting, he was unjustly accused of serious mismanagement. The Powers That Be believed the accusers, and he was fired for cause. Margie knew it was unfair but was not in a position to stop the firing.
I was horrified, and immediately sat down to write a letter to Jim. It didn’t say much other than, “hey, Margie told me what happened to you, and I’m so sorry. You were always a really good boss, take care.”
Fast forward another five or ten years. I was back in Boston and ran into Jim on a bus. We arranged to have lunch and catch up.
During our lunch, he was at pains to thank me for the letter I had written him - he said it had really meant a lot to him at a time when he was depressed and worried about his future. (Happily, by the time of our lunch he was back on his feet and had a good job.)
I probably shouldn’t have been surprised to hear him say that, but I was. I hadn’t realized how much it would mean to him. I was just so damned angry that he’d been mistreated, I really wanted to let him know I supported him.
One of the first jobs I landed as a kid was as a stock/bag boy at the local grocery store.
The store manager was the one who extended the job offer and hired me.
However, just after getting hired but before I even came in for my first shift, local news broke that this manager was having parties at his house with the stock/bag boys, getting them drunk, and molesting them. He was arrested and lost his job immediately.
The rest of the bag boys were fired, quit, or their parents made them quit.
I showed up for work to find the assistant manager. He called me into his new office, explained how he was now the new store manager, and since I was the only kid left, was now the new head stock/bag boy.
I’m guessing that it was a “None Of The Above” scenario? 
One day when I worked at the grocery store, my technician hung up the phone and told me that there was going to be a brief “emergency meeting” and they needed one person from each department to attend. She went, and came back about 15 minutes later with a very sad look on her face.
Here’s what happened: One of the assistant managers had been caught stealing cash out of the safe. They knew cash was coming up missing, so they put a pinhole camera in the safe, and she was the one who was repeatedly opening the safe, removing a few bills from each bundle, and replacing them. :smack: They were able to prove that she had stolen about $8,000, but we all knew the amount was probably much higher.
We were all shocked that she would do thing like this; she was a married mother of 2 teenagers who was about 40 years old, and we all figured it was due to either gambling or drugs. It turned out that she had a serious cocaine addiction, and that was how she hid it from her family. She was fired and told that she would not have to go to jail if she paid the money back within a certain period of time. IDR if she had to go to treatment; other than this, by all accounts her drug use did not affect her job. Another assistant manager was one of her best friends, and was completely blindsided by this (and sobbing inconsolably during the meeting).
Not long afterwards, we found out that she had applied for a job at a local catalog call center. This is a place that will hire literally anyone who can fog a mirror, but not her once the truth was told to them. Had she gone to work there, she would have had access to people’s credit card numbers. :dubious: