It sounds like Bub was on the plank for other reasons, and this gave them a reason to finally shove him off.
And that “reason” gave him a way to sue them.
I thought that too, but North Carolina is an at-will employment state, so incidents like this one tend to get swept under the rug.
Definitely true at this company!
I’m not sure since there was no further discussion of the matter, but I think this was the same guy who would occasionally help himself to items from the scrap metal bin (which, because of the type of work we do, often contains alloys that are worth quite a bit - that’s why the company collects the stuff).
Nothing ever came of that - possibly for the reason above. This would probably have been reason enough for firing at other companies, but Scrap Metal Guy’s supervisor was willing to look the other way for whatever reason (the most common excuse I heard was that Scrap Metal Guy was a long-term employee who knew what he was doing, and that it would be too much of a hassle to replace him). The guy who caught Bub having a fit in the parking lot was not his manager, and was also known to have been frustrated with the consideration given to Scrap Metal Guy.
Different shifts, perhaps?
I have a fairly similar tale. Can’t put too many details but someone was working on two unrelated projects (for the same high-level employer) as an independent contractor, and managed to “work” more than 168 hours in a week. He was gone quickly when someone somehow saw invoices for the two projects.
A sadder tale: there was a fellow at my husband’s company who was hired to do IT work, and was just getting his life back together after a bankruptcy. He did good work for quite a while.
Then he began to enjoy himself too much (drinking, drugs), and it got to be a habit at the company to call him every day at noon to suggest he come to work. They were in major crunch mode, so half-assed was better than none.
As soon as crunch mode ended, he was gone. I gather things really went downhill from there.
Er, I got the impression that “fired” meant “terminated”, quite possibly “with extreme prejudice”. or the fellow may have wished he had been.
We had an office bully who was just a mean, nasty person all the way around. No one knew what she was actually supposed to be doing, she spent her days sticking her nose in where it didn’t belong and trying to catch people making mistakes. She treated everyone horribly, not just employees but also clients and vendors. We had people who said they wouldn’t do business with us anymore because of her. One of the dozens of VPs at the company was her boss and thought she was wonderful, so people would complain but nothing ever came of it except for a few slaps on the wrist.
About a year ago office bully decided she needed to insert herself into a project I was working on. A teammate and I were doing some tweaking to some new software that was being built to make it easier for new hires to use. Office bully started coming to the meetings to “make sure we weren’t asking for too much.” She kept vetoing things we asked for even though my boss and the IT guys in charge of the project told my teammate and I that pretty much whatever we asked for was do-able. During one of the meetings office bully was attending my teammate asked for something to be labeled differently. Office bully went ballistic. Screaming at us that we should be happy with what we had and we were wasting time and that if the new hires couldn’t figure out the labels that was their problem. Then she stormed out of the room, went back to her desk, and proceeded to crash the test systems. Somehow she had access to the test systems (probably her boss gave her access for some reason) and ran a report she knew would make us unable to work on the systems. The funny part of this was that while office bully was having her hissy fit one of the IT guys changed the labels to look how we wanted. It was a five minute fix.
Someone in the room that day went to her boss’s boss and said “This is bullshit!” I’m not 100% sure who complained but they’re a hero in my book. A day or two later as I was coming into the building I got greeted by the lovely sight of office bully being marched out of the building by HR. That was such a happy day. The project got finished in record time without office bully’s interference and everyone was in a much better mood without her skulking around.
OK I have one but it has a slight twist at the end.
Back around the mid 90s I had to work 2 jobs to make ends meet. I had a college degree and had a job with a major govt contractor near the Washington DC area in Northern VA. I had to work a second job to make ends meet because a family member who had cosigned a lease with me baled and left me high and dry. Anyway the second job was as a cashier at a local Safeway grocery store.
There was this bagging guy call him O - real young - who had a lot of swagger and a real ability to get the least amount of work done in a day that you could believe. He would show up front when we were busy but would seem to be at another part of the store whenever you wanted him for something. He was in the union - so was I - so he was able to coast by whenever this was brought up because no one could find where he was going etc. (at this time Safeway’s worked the fewest amount of employees legally allowed by state law)
Well he eventually volunteered to stock the drink machines and cigarette machines every few days. This involved loading them up and collecting the money from them. Well you can guess that some money came up missing and he was blamed along with another younger high school boy. The high school boy admitted to stealing some $$ but our guy O was blamed for the majority of the thefts. ( I had asked the hs guy after he left and he confessed that O taught him the scam).
Well long story short he was finally fired about a year later on basically enough bad reviews that he could be run out.
Many years later long after I had left that second job I ended up at another major govt contractor and who should I see stepping off of the elevator at my building but O! He works at my company.
He was all smiles (he is a charming guy) and when I looked him up I found out that he is a Sr principle proj manager! I did some discreet checking and apparently he is the real deal now and is honest, dependable and well though of.
I guess 20 years can make a difference.
Several jobs ago, a newly-hired coworker (whom I’ll call Charlie because screw him) did so little to make himself tolerable that as the deadline of his 60-day probationary period neared, I approached my other co-workers to see if it was just me or if everyone was having the same experience working with Charlie. Turns out, everyone was getting the same amount of anti-joy working with Charlie as I was. So, I took it upon myself to meet with our manager and the building manager to lay out the complaints.
A day or two later was his probationary review, which normally is a laughably pro-forma “you’re doing a great job, keep it up” meeting. I happened to be in the break room adjacent to the room where they were meeting, so this is first hand reporting: about 10-15 minutes into the meeting, Charlie positively exploded out of the meeting, face beet red, disappeared around the corner, and shortly thereafter abandoned the building, never to return. Apparently, he was just that unwilling to modify his behavior that he preferred to rage quit.
And he was missed by precisely no one.
Were Bub and Scrap Metal Guy the same person, or do you not know? Anyway, if Bub was indeed helping himself to the goodies in the scrap metal bin, that in itself would be stealing from the employer, and grounds for termination in itself.
I never found out for sure, but I do know for certain that there were several managers who thought he should have been fired after the theft incident. Heck, several of the guy’s coworkers couldn’t believe he was still employed after that. So I’m guessing that either the parking lot rant was a lot worse than I realized, or this one manager finally saw a chance to get rid of the guy.