Sorry, it’s late and I’ve just downed a stiff martini. So I’m not sure I understand you. And maybe my post was garbled in my attempt to be clever. I meant Barb was fired. I thought the company should have moved Barb elsewhere and given her another chance, in light of her long history of good service. And they should have fired Gail. But Barb got scapegoated instead.
I once had a boss that was fired but frankly I dont think he did anything wrong other than being someones scrapegoat. He totally got thrown under a bus.
In another case the upper level managements expectations for him were totally out of line and he was pushed out.
In both cases it taught us underlings we do NOT want to go into management.
Was the guy’s name Jean Valjean by any chance?
If you’ve ever read the copyright page of mass-market paperback, sometimes you’ll see a little notice to the effect of “if you purchased this book without a cover, be aware that it was reported to the published as “unsold and destroyed” and thus this is a stolen item.” Or something like that.
Now then.
Years ago, right out of high school, I worked at a Borders store. We had a new boss come in that, as far as I could tell, had never set foot in a bookstore in his life. He had to be completely trained form the ground up, which took a couple of weeks. Working the cash registers and ordering the books and managing inventory… all of it he had to learn. He had shitty customer service skills so we had to try to coach him on that, as well.
One of the jobs we flunkies had to do was “rip” books, or destroy unsold copies of books that are often rotated for newer editions such as Harlequin Romance and the like. The basic procedure was to rip off the cover, put those aside, and then toss the now cover-less books in the trash. The covers would be sent to the publisher and the store would get a credit on the unsold books. Since this was usually only done once or twice a month we usually ended up having several big boxes of books to throw out. We would wait till the end of shift after we had closed up, counted the till, locked the safe, swept the floor, and done whatever else we needed to do then walk together (always two people closing) to the dumpster to toss the boxes in and then walk together across the parking lot to the bank to make the nightly deposit. Sort of an attempt to keep each person accountable to the other.
One day I came in and the new boss was gone. I was told he’d been fired. Nobody would tell me why. Finally a week or so later I learned that he had somehow (I still don’t know how) been caught stealing the ripped books. Since we ripped the books after the doors were closed for the day and then took them to the dumpster, and the boss never worked closing after one or two training days (and wouldn’t have been alone anyways), the only way he could have committed the theft was to wait until the middle of the night and then go dumpster diving.
This was a small down with a shitty economy. The store had maybe 10 employees, some had been there a decade or more. The new boss got a primo job with a good salary, only to get shitcanned two weeks into it for stealing ripped-apart Harlequin romances that he fished out of a dumpster. A lot of people were really, really pissed. The whole store had spent a lot of time and energy in an attempt to bring the guy quickly up to speed. Total waste.
Around 1990 I landed a temp position at Bear Stearns at the main headquarters in NYC. My first task was to go into a stock closet and count the boxes (piled to the ceiling) of canned air, monitor cleaning wipes, and other assorted computer maintenance products. The next day, my boss’s boss was terminated. Seems I was the grunt who was willing to bring to the forefront the depth of his kickback purchases.
More indiscretions were certainly uncovered not too long afterwards for that firm.
I knew a guy in a government position, who I will call Bob. He was having some deep disagreements with his own bosses about what was going on. Long story short, Bob thought there was a disconnect between his department’s management and the senior leadership, in that Bob’s department managers weren’t giving completely accurate information to the leadership. So he goes to a lower-level manager in a different department and has this conference where he lays out what is happening from his perspective.
At first, it wasn’t really a bad thing. It was just a couple of guys collaborating and sharing information about work stuff. Then someone says, “Hey, this is really important,” and they invite their friend to come hear what Bob has to say. And then another. And another.
At some point, I had to step out to take a phone call or something. By the time I came back, the room was packed with a dozen or more mid-to-high level managers, and Bob is going on a full-blown rant about how messed up his department is. Or, more precisely, how messed up his department’s managers are.
At the time I was still pretty junior and inexperienced in office politics. I would like to think that if I saw the same thing happening now, I would have the presence of mind to grab him by the scruff of his neck and say, “Bob, stop and think about what you’re doing.” But I didn’t. Who knows if it would have even made any difference, since the damage was pretty much done by that point. This makes me sad because I actually liked Bob as a boss.
Anyway, by the time Bob made it back to his desk, word had already travelled through the grapevine that Bob had been badmouthing his leaders to the rest of the company. This did not end well for Bob.
I had a supervisor who was dumb as a box of rocks. She had a degree, but from one of those dubious tiny Christian colleges that pop up like mushrooms after the rain, then disappear when the sun shines on them. What she lacked in intelligence and education, she possessed in good looks. She was tiny, with enormous brown eyes and delicate features. I didn’t dislike her, but there was no doubt in anyone’s mind how she got the job. The business owner who had hired her was a notorious horn dog.
We had spent months courting and hiring a prestigious scientist to head a project group that would be tasked with developing a new device for a government contract. We finally got him and he’d been on board about six months, doing one helluva job. He had a very common name. It wasn’t John Smith, but it was something equally generic. We also had another John Smith, an underperforming accountant in the Finance Department. When given directions to let John Smith go, the idiot called the scientist in and fired him! Even the horndog couldn’t overlook this one. Her personally watched her pack her belongings and walked her out to the car.
stillownedbysetters, did they hire the Scientist back?
I’ve never been involved in a boss losing their job, but I’ve seen a coulple go.
First was my Director/Big Boss, who was (1) Very competent (2) Very abrasive and (3) Very arrogant. This would have been Ok if it has been just his employees, because we can forgive a lot of 2 and 3 if the person is 1, but he was the same way to his peers and his superiors. I was but a lowly GS-11 at the time, so I never got the whole story, but it ended in litigation that he finally won, but by then his job was long gone.
Second was a USAF Colonel (Full Bird) in charge of the Embassy Military Liaison Office in a country I worked in. He was, for a Colonel, fairly irreverant and often said what he thought, including opinions of the host country. well, one day I stop by there and he’s sitting at his desk looking very serious, and in less than a week he was gone out of country. Never did find out what he said or to whom, but it was enough that the country told the USA to ‘get him out of here’ and at a high-enough level to make it happen immediately.
In a way, I’m relatively glad I was low enough on the totem pole not to be involved in the ‘big guys’ troubles.
SSRat, we DID get him back, but it took six weeks and a lot of money to soothe his ruffled feathers. Project was a success, though, so it was worth it.
Had a boss back in the day who was an IT Director who for some reason reported directly to the CFO. One day he was fired. As in walked out the door. They wouldn’t tell us why, but it got around that he was sexually harassing his boss. :smack:
Way back in the day working at a newspaper. New Editor, brought in by corporate to be in charge. Starts having lunch individually with reporters and copy editors to understand what’s going on.
About two weeks in the corporate executive tells senior staff (including editor) that their boss the publisher was being let go the following week when he came up so start planning what you need to do.
Editor thought it was wrong Publisher didn’t know so marched in and told him. Corporate thought it was wrong Editor told Publisher and fired both of them.
Other guy who lost out was copy editor that Editor took to lunch that day - Editor was short on cash and asked copy editor to pay and he’d pay him back.
I had a manager in a well-known telecommunications company - one of a succession of many over nineteen years, many of whom I can no longer remember and some of whom only stopped long enough to get their ticket punched before moving on to bigger and better things. He came in with a reputation for appalling people skills, which turned out to be fully justified. I did not make much effort to hide my disdain for him, and I would probably have got canned before much longer, if his boss hadn’t turned up one morning for an ‘interview without coffee’ after which he was gone. (Faint fragments of the row were overheard by one of the others).
Sadly, I heard that he subsequently survived to get a post in another branch of the organisation and no doubt practised his appalling people skills on them instead.
I was laid off on the last day of my probation period. Apparently my manager was incompetent and blamed me for it but interestingly enough upper management never bothered to ask me about it. When it all came out (and of course at that point I knew I was out of there no matter what I said) like when the manager had me work a day and a half on a project that turned out to be one of her homework assignments or that she wouldn’t notify me of assignments I was supposed to be doing that they were honestly surprised. I was still let go but within two months when they realized her sheer incompetence they fired her and the quote in the meeting where the decision was made was “We fired the wrong person.”
Boss A, who had been here over a decade, retired.
Boss B takes over for a couple of months, then suddenly gets fired. Corporate will not say why. Rumor has it, he was using the company checkbook to buy personal items.
Boss C takes over for a couple of months, then suddenly gets fired. Corporate will not say why. Newspaper reports her being indicted for felony embezzlement.
Boss D gets promoted from within. A few grumblings about seniority, but so far, he has worked out well.
This was the most likely scenario.
By “none of the above”, I mean that they ended up doing something nobody could have predicted.
That happened to an old boss of mine too.
The job he got afterwards was even worse; going into detail could potentially identify him, so I won’t, but I’ll just say that he didn’t deserve any of this.
What country was it? You can PM me if you don’t want to post it here.
Several years and two jobs ago… One Monday morning the boss doesn’t show up. No message on the voice mail, no email, no nothing. Co-worker tries to call him, gets his voice mail. Couple hours later we get a collect call from the county jail. Boss has been in the drunk tank. Co-worker goes to the jail and picks him up and brings him home. Next day, no boss again. Chairman of the board comes in to say that boss has been fired. Apparently ex-boss called the chairman to come pick him up first and used some rather colorful language toward the chairman. This wasn’t the only thing ex-boss had messed up, this was just the last straw.
Let me think about it…I still work for the Government and they get…touchy…at times about such things. If you want to PM me with the country you’re thinking of and the approximate time (within a 5-8 yr window), I will confirm or disabuse.
I went for an interview at a large defense contract, for a job doing software development for a new weapon system. On a Wednesday. Interviewed with a manager – seemed to be going well. He then took me to the project leader, who also interviewed me. And who then introduced me to the team working on the project, and invited me to sit in on their mid-week progress meeting. Then they gave me a couple hours briefing on the project, and a couple notebooks full of design info on the system, company newsletters, even application for a company parking permit. Then walked me down to HR to get copies of all the new-hire forms (and security clearance ones) so that 'I could fill them out at home and so be ready to start work right away when I got there.
I figured that I had the job, and spent a couple of days filling out all those forms, while waiting for the call from HR confirming the job offer and giving my start date.
It never came.
By the next week, I called in ans asked to speak to the project manager, or the project leader that had interviewed me – only to be told ‘they no longer work for this company. No further information is available about them.’ And that was it.
Later, I heard that they had underbid the design part, expecting to make up the loss on the actual building of the weapon over many years. But the Pentagon accepted their design, but awarded the build contract to another bidder. So the whole project was cancelled.