The most satisfying instance of a person's firing/job termination (i.e., they deserved it).

In My Humble Opinion
41

One more, working security. This guy got his license at the same time I did; it’s a really basic course (big surprise, I know) but he was* so* proud of passing it. Admittedly, he only actually acquired the license due to our future boss vouching for him having changed his ways, as his background check ran to 4 pages, but still…

At the start, I thought he was a bit of a blowhard, kept going on about his military background; he’d been a grunt, no danger of promotion, and I’m not sure why he left, but I do know it wasn’t entirely voluntary. Liked telling me about shooting people. After a while, I realised that ‘psycho’ was closer to the mark. He boasted about smashing up his pregnant girlfriend’s car, because she tried to go for a night out with some friends, risking his baby. He already had 3 kids with 2 other women he wasn’t allowed to contact. Violence was his one and only solution to any problem.

Generally, he scared the crap out of me every time I had to work with him, but he’d do anything the boss (also ex military) told him, however dodgy, so the boss liked him… Until he got put in charge for one contract.

It was a complicated event, some distance away. I was driving down in my car, the rest were coming by minibus, organised by Psycho, then most left at 10, some stayed til 2am, and I gave the a lift back. I think they’d hired our company three times, and there were another couple in the pipeline, and it was a really nice, fun event.

Most of the week wasn’t too bad, the event guys knew what they were doing, and Psycho wasn’t able to change much. Then came Friday, the big night. The problem started when one staff member didn’t show, and psycho kept the minibus waiting for him for over an hour before he’d let it leave, even though the last person was a ‘luxury extra’, and we could do the event without him. This meant the bus hit rush hour, and got caught in a horrendous traffic jam involving a major diversion.

He then called the company the contract was with and, instead of telling them what was happening, told them the bus was stuck in traffic ten minutes away. So, the event -requiring security to legally operate- got all prepped up to start, ready to go the moment they arrived. And waited… and waited. All the time, he’s calling saying they’ll be there any moment, they’re just round the corner, they can almost see the place. At which point I got a text from one of the other guys on the bus saying ‘Can hear Psycho claiming we’re nearly there. Wth? We’re not even on the bridge (over an hour away) yet’ but everyone was already on location, because security were just round the corner.

The bus got there nearly 2 hours late. Over an hour after the event had been due to start. For an event with a timed, ticketed start. This meant about 500 pissed off people had been queuing up in the dark over an hour after their slot, over 50 event volunteers had now been standing out in the dark (in costumes), in places like industrial estates by themselves, without any radio contact (or phones, due to the costumes) or security backup for over an hour… It was lucky no-one had got mugged.

It was bizarre, we’d both been working there all week, and the guys running it were some of the nicest people I’ve ever met. If he’d phoned and just been damn honest that they left a bit late and the main road was closed, the organisers would have understood. Not been happy, of course, but they would have understood. Instead, he chose not only to lie, but to lie in a way that would be almost immediately proven a lie. That lie lost the company an awesome contract; the next event was in our city, and they cancelled it.

When the company- very reasonably- then refused to pay that two hours wages for the staff that were not there (they paid the rest without a murmur, and they did pay mine in full, because I was there, even though I was just sitting there waiting and drinking tea), the moron tried to pretend the event team were making it up and his team had been there on time… I have no clue how he thought he was going to get away with this, but I’m not sure ‘thought’ is the right term.

So yeah, the boss finally realised what everyone else had worked out months/years ago, and fired Mr Crazypants.

42

My manager at Giant Software Company hired a guy “Marty”, who had supposedly just obtained a master’s degree in Computer Sciences from a prestigious university. I never believed this, but never proved otherwise.

Marty was an idiot. The first thing he did upon arriving was to force the company to buy him an expensive ergonomic chair. It was huge and a source of great amusement for the rest of the group. He spent most of his time demanding special treatment of one kind or another.

Marty could not read code, despite being sent to a programming class in the language we used. On more than one occasion, he vehemently insisted that code did a certain thing because “that’s what the comments say”. That always got a big laugh.

Eventually, he was let go for incompetence (a very big deal at this company). He was such a weird creep that I honestly thought he might come back with a gun and start shooting. For the first month after he was fired, I worked from home as much as possible.

I don’t remember what happened to his chair.

43

This happened a long time ago, when I was doing my post-doc. Shortly before I had come on board, the boss had hired a woman to be a lab manager. Mind you, there was already a lab manager. But he was getting stretched too thin with all the work that needed to be done. The second lab manager (the woman) and I were hired to share the burden.

Now, she initially struck me as an admirable person. She was very confident and seemed to know everyone and everything. She was just a year older than me but she seemed so much more sophisticated and put together than I was. It didn’t take long for me to feel inadequate around her. And it totally didn’t help that she was a “one-upper”.

Like, we’d be talking and I’d mentioned I once took a trip to, say, Vermont. And she would come back with a long story about how she went to Vermont too, during her solo hike up the Appalachian Trail. It was like a conversation with her wasn’t complete without it ending with me saying, “Wow, that’s so cool.” She was always dropping names, too. I would mention wanting to check out a touristy or educational event happening in the area, and she’d mention how her best friend is the executive director of the event and how the two of them once hiked up the Appalachian Trail together along with her other best friend Carl Hiassen. “You should totally join us on our next trip!” she’d say.

My boss loved her, while I know for a fact that he was disappointed in me (he told me so). So part of me was totally jealous of this chick. I wanted just a fraction of her sensibility and knowledge, and I hated that I could never measure up with her around.

One day she was out of the lab, and I overhead the lab staff talking shit about her. They had coined a nickname for her. “Moon Girl”. Why was she called that? Because it didn’t matter what you were talking about, she was always going to “one-up” you all the way to the moon. As in, you could be talking about how you went kayaking at Biscayne Bay over the weekend and she would come back with, “Oh yeah? Well, I’ve been kayaking on the MOON.” My coworkers had noticed something that I had been too dim to pick up on. The girl was a big liar. I didn’t want to believe that at first because why in the hell would she lie so much? Why would she lie to me, a big nobody? So surely some of her stories had to be true. But gradually, I started noticing the inconsistencies in her stories. I also noticed that she wasn’t that great at her job. She was good at bossing people around and talking like she was in charge. But she didn’t actually do much. None of the technicians liked or respected her. The other lab manager wanted to kill her.

It took a while for the boss to catch a clue. But one day I came into work and found out she’d been fired for lying. I don’t know what lie she told, but it was big enough for the scales to fall from my boss’s eyes. Suddenly I was no longer the one who was a big disappointment. So I guess you can say I felt both relief and schadenfreude that she was fired.

44

There was a technician at the hospital who would stick around, presumably on the clock, for an hour or more after her shift was over, and just chit-chat with other people. This woman was always getting in trouble for this, that, or the other thing, but AFAIK they kept her on because she, conversely, got other people in trouble - you know, that type of person? For example, another pharmacy employee got really sick and was in the ICU for a few days, and Technician caused so much trouble - calling us and asking where meds were that we hadn’t yet gotten the orders for, that kind of thing - that a “Family Only” sign was put on the door to that employee’s ICU bay, and Technician was banned from the ICU; she was given tasks where she wouldn’t have to go there, and apparently faced some pretty dire things if she broke that rule.

AFAIK, she still works there; she’d be close to retirement age by now.

45

My 1000% vote is for the guy who sent out the false incoming missile text alert for Hawaii this past February. In a nutshell it was 38 minutes of terror between the first alert stating an incoming missile was headed our way (this was during a time when North Korea was still heavily doing missile tests) and the second alert that it was an error. A lot of people figured out it was a false alarm because the emergency sirens didn’t go off, but it must have been hell, especially during the first minutes. Fortunately, I was fast asleep during all the chaos.and would have been gone in a literal flash as there are strategic military bases all over the island of Oahu.

The unidentified button pusher continually claimed he thought it was real and not a test, but that doesn’t matter. I’m just glad he’s gone!

46

I am pleased to say that when I took on an administrative management role some years ago, I actually checked the credentials on file for the employees–not just looked at them and said “okay,” but confirmed people’s license and certificate status at their state boards, discovering many discrepancies between claims and reality. I also translated some diplomas from Latin and discovered that some people had degrees that weren’t what they claimed they were. Satisfying.

47

At my past job we had one of those newly promoted bosses who decided the way to improve productivity was to basically ignore every single rule management, our company, OSHA, and the Government had laid out in terms of safety or proper equipment usage to get things done. Whenever he told us to do something questionable he would smile and say “I don’t care how much trouble I get in, just as long as it gets done” with a huge shitting eating grin like he was the first person ever to realize cutting corners made the work much faster. This attitude worked for him for 2 months until he was ordering a forklift to immediately start unloading new product from a truck without making sure the trailer was stationary. Of course the moment the forklift entered the truck the trailer started to roll forward since it hasn’t been properly chocked yet and the forklift and a bunch of new merchandise fell out the back onto the concrete. The driver wasn’t injured but we heavily damaged a forklift and all that good merchandise. The boss wasn’t exactly fired but the last time I saw him he was back to his pre-management job.

48

Ditto to this. My first college degree track was civil engineering; one of several reasons I got out of it was because I just wasn’t comfortable at the thought of signing my name guaranteeing something would NEVER fail, and knowing it would be my ass if something ever did. If a doctor screws up, a patient can die. If an engineer screws up, hundreds of people can die, and it has happened. That you don’t hear about it happening much is a testament to the professionalism of engineers/engineering in the U.S. and most modern, western countries. In other places with less rigorous professional standards buildings/bridges collapse all the time, drinking water gets polluted, roads wash away in storms, dams give way, etc. And people die.

49

Wow, this sounds exactly like one of my colleagues !

Like you, I felt completely dazzled and outclassed by her achievements and qualifications. Not to mention totally mesmerized by her warm personnality and, I must admit, good looks. But then I realized I didn’t feel good being around her. Something was off. I started noticing the small, but telling, inconsistencies in her stories and some of her reactions were borderline taunting.

I sure don’t want her to get fired, because I still like her to an extent and she really hasn’t done anything reprehensible, professionally or personally, at least to my knowledge. But I’m sure backing off.

50

We acquired a (basically bankrupt) company and as part of the “on-boarding” process we did a background check on all the inherited corporate staff. First we found their “Chief Accounting Officer” had never passed the CPA exam. His license in the file was fake. The “Director of Technical Accounting” had let his license lapse a few years earlier. The “Director of Clinical Programs” had his license revoked. Safety inspectors lacked the required certifications.

Apparently the company, when they got into financial difficulties, stopped paying for license renewals and CPE, attempting to push the burden onto the employees. Who mostly responded by ignoring the requirements, and the company turned a blind eye.

After the license and certification deficiencies surfaced, we asked HR for the personnel files. All the original applications and resumes had disappeared.

The employees were only on board for six to twelve months to help integrate the company, so at that point we simply stopped worrying about validation and reduced their responsibilities as much as possible to mitigate our risk.

The financial information they had did turn out to be accurate, thankfully. I guess committing bank fraud or bankruptcy fraud was s bridge too far for them.

51

Another one:

These I didn’t get to meet, but I worked with one of the people who got saved. When the Rohm and Haas Company acquired Morton (yes, the salt people), one of the factories they got was Moss Point. A peculiarity of RH was that pretty much anybody in a management position had some sort of STEM background: the accountants were people who at some point had become interested in accounting and gotten MBAs or CPAs, moving into Finance from other areas in the company.

When a team from Accounting got to Moss Point to do the post-acquisition audit, they saw a guy dumping some brightly-colored liquids into a rain ditch. “Uh, what’s that?” “Oh, nothing for you guys to worry about!”

As soon as the accountants were by themselves, they took the phone and called Home Office. “Legal, please.” The factory manager and the production manager left what would soon be a Superfund site in panda cars. My coworker was among the few people who got offered a transfer, thanks to having a documented history of arguing that those practices were illegal, immoral, unacceptable and other things a proper Southern Lady really shouldn’t have known how to pronounce (then again, about the only word she could say in Spanish was coño and she said it with enormous gusto).

52

Over the years, I had quite a few colleagues, both in school and afterwards (interestingly, all of them men) who started out with some kind of engineering major, and switched to pharmacy; I’ve always heard that the reason was because they couldn’t handle the higher math required for engineering, but I do wonder now that you mention it that this may also have been a factor.

One of my uncles is a long-retired engineer, close to 80 years old, and just within the past few years, he had to go to court to testify about some issues with a bridge he helped design several decades ago. Fortunately, the problem was found before anyone got hurt. (Don’t know any more details, but we all found this quite interesting.)

53

We had a new foreman come in from another of our locations. Right from day-one we all knew he was not only a jerk but knew nothing about supervising. Along with all his uselessness he had gathered together a number of groupies at work, and he was banging one of the married women, aka Miss Teflon.
My first interaction with him and I was checking the calendar as to when I could retire.

One day he got sent out of town to a safety conference and took three co-workers with him, including Miss Teflon.
Bombing along the highway in a rented car he got pulled over for speeding. Actually, for excessive speed which means an automatic seizure of the rental car for seven days and a pile of fines. And what else did the cop discover in the rental car? Open alcohol.
Yes, he was shown the door. I don’t even think the union defended him. The next day at work almost all of us were high-fiving. Sometimes life is sweet.
Unfortunately one other guy in the car got the boot too, and unfortunately Miss Teflon did not. Ergo her name.

54

Translation:

Way back, Vorlon worked as a Night Auditor at a resort. He reported to the controller, who had pull and who liked him, so he was protected, politically speaking. One of the Assistant Managers couldn’t keep his pants zipped and was sleeping around with the staff. The controller was not happy, for a variety of reasons, personal and professional. Vorlon was asked to document the AM’s activities.

Everything came to a head when it was discovered that the AM in question had an STD (or STDs), and was spreading them around. The last straw was when he hooked up with the formerly innocent daughter of a connected family (mafia, one presumes).

To wrap up: Vorlon provided a paper trail that documented the activities of a serial sexual harasser who was spreading STDs among the staff. The man in question got fired.

(Well done.)

55

I’m pretty sure at least 3 of these replies are about me. :frowning:

56

I figured it out, piece by piece, after several readings. Thanks for the effort anyway.

57

I worked for the regional chapter of a nationally-known non-profit about 20 years ago. The Executive Director of the chapter was was one of the most vile individuals I’ve ever met. A total egomaniac and narcissist, her method of how to inspire her underlings was browbeating and humiliation. It was painful to watch, and even more painful to be subjected to it on the rare occasion I was the target. Fortunately, I had been in the workforce for 25 years, and the kind of stuff she pulled on people with less real life experience didn’t work on me. An example: Her birthday, Boss’s Day and any other Hallmark holiday were to be met with cards and gifts, and woe be it to the poor schmuck who forgot. We had constant turnover, but the thing was, we were one of the most successful chapters in the organization in terms of fund raising. Some time after I left she was promoted to the National Office for her exemplary work. Less than six months later she was gone. I don’t know why but I’m guessing she tried pulling the same crap on a much higher level and quickly made her presence unwelcome. I don’t delight in the misfortune of other people, generally, but whatever happened to her, she richly deserved.

58

Yes, I was also trying to get at the fact that this story as told can’t be understood. The story is told in some kind of insider code.

Furthermore, the story doesn’t clearly state what the actual bad acts are. What did this guy actually do wrong? What were the actual acts of malfeasance that led to his dismissal? What made him so repulsive that the poster took joy in his dismissal?

59

Herpes Harry, on company time, and half the time, company location, managed to infect underlings with presently incurable STD’s. This made the company liable for damages. After action reports indicated that he refused to wear condoms, which might have reduced the infection rate. It wasn’t one life he damaged, there were over a dozen complaints when the trigger got pulled.

60

I work at a small company; even though we have a high rate of turnover, firings are rare. The most exciting one was a guy (let’s call him Bub) who got a less than satisfactory performance review, and a bare minimum raise to go along with it. He headed out to the parking lot with his mobile phone to vent. Company policy prohibits discussing salary on company property unless you’re behind closed doors with your supervisor or manager, and unfortunately for Bub, one of the managers happened to be outside enjoying a smoke break when he started his phone rant. Upon finishing his smoke break, this manager had Bub escorted off the property, and sent around an email informing the entire company that a) salary is not a topic of conversation, and b) any sightings of Bub near company property were to be reported to management at once.