Things you could've been fired for. (Luckily, you weren't.)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

So I thought this would be an interesting thread. Obviously, it’s not a good idea to post about your current job, but I’m sure we’ve all done something that could’ve gotten us fired, put on leave, or at least written up. For whatever reason, we weren’t caught.

I recently read an article about a teacher who was fired for organizing a Hoodie/Trayvon Martin fundraiser at her school. I sometimes think that I’m going to be “that” teacher who gets laid off for just going about her business. Like the teacher fired for receiving IVF. Or just let go for opening her big mouth.

In the past, I have:
[ul][li]Reported a school for abusing children (it was a special ed setting) - before the union, it was definitely a fire-able offense. In fact, some staffers were mysteriously let go or internally ‘investigated’ for ‘child abuse’ after it was found out they’d issued complaints to the state. Luckily, no one suspected little ole me. Sadly, the powers-that-be never stepped in.[/li][li]Sworn at kids. At my current job, I told them to sit the f— down. (Hey, they were fighting!) I’ve sworn around kids by the slip of the tongue, but never at them. Oh, except for when I said “bullshit”. (Stuff was getting stolen.) Uh, yeah, I’m not a jerk.[/li][li]Fudged a grade 3 points so a single 17 year old mom could pass the class and graduate[/li][/ul]

Things that had to do with money - kind of borderline and most teachers do this kind of stuff sometimes, but the wrong boss could make an issue out of it:
[ul]
[li]Given bus money or food money to kids (yup, that was verboten)[/li][li]Given students items of mine (clothes for a homeless girl, a hair clip I made that a student liked, a bracelet I wore maybe once a year, a cool pen, an old phone charger to replace one that was stolen in class)[/li][li]Got two girls Christmas presents and sent them anonymously after their dad left them and mom lost her job[/li][li]Was at a Hello Kitty store while on vacation and was reminded of a student who was obsessed with HK. I picked her up a couple of pencils and a scented eraser. She was thrilled.[/li][/ul]

I know. I’m such a rebel. I’ve never done anything in my classroom that was really sketchy, but them’s were technically the rules.

But…in college, before I even thought I liked kids…I worked in an entirely different setting. Once, I accidentally told a wholesale client what our ‘cost’ was. Via fax, too. I sent the wrong form. :confused: I cost the company $300k in three minutes. I would’ve been fired had I not been the boss’s daughter, but instead my dad decided he wouldn’t let me live that down for months. So getting fired for being a run-of-the-mill moron is clearly still an option for me. :smiley:

You?

2

Slept with my boss.

We were engaged, sooo…

3

I’ve been fired for every good reason, and for many bad reasons.

4

I once threw a can of Coke at my boss (postmaster). I missed.

5

Holy Cow?! Really?! I do this stuff every day, all day long – I never dreamed there would be a school that had a problem with it. The most recent “horrible” thing I’ve done was alter a borrowed prom dress so a girl could go to prom looking good. And I did it at school! Ha! I’m such a bad person!:cool: I guess I’m really lucky I teach at a rural school.

6

They weren’t fired for it, but several co-workers of mine got in trouble when they called the internal “anonymous” hotline to report unethical behavior. I called the same hotline on the same person but was wary enough to not give them my name (and call from a pay phone!) The guy in question got off scot free because he was best buds with the customer.

7

I used to do construction cleanup in and around a microchip-processing plant. It was an all-hours job, and at night there’d be barrels and barrels of these little metal cut-outs left out for garbage. They were very pretty cut-outs; very, VERY thin metal, incredibly lacy and bendy, gold and silver and copper colours. Just really neat and unusual.
I used to help myself to a dozen or so of them at a time to use as book-marks, and with some vague notion of making something artsy with a group of them. I mean, hey, they were just throwing them out!

Not sure how long after I worked there that it was that I realized that those weren’t just gold and silver and copper coloured, but actual gold, silver and copper, leftover from tapping out the little bits used on the chips, and they were being left out for recycling pickup. Unfortunately it was after I’d long lost the ones that I had, lol.

They were very pretty bookmarks. I keep hoping that one of these days I’ll find one in storage somewhere that made it through all the moving.

8

We used to send annoying kids all over the building asking other teachers for things. The things were metric adjustable wrenches, board stretchers, left-handed screwdrivers, and so on. The teacher queried would reply “I gave that to Mr. Someotherteacher, go see him” or “he’s not getting that back until he returns my stuffed armadillo.” There were about six of us in on this all over the building. We could rid ourselves of an unwanted student for half a period doing this.

Ahh, good times.

9

I’m impressed. That is a wonderful example of team work in the effort to mitigate the tedium of life, defying authority, and pulling shit on kids.

10

In our science department, we’d send them for “a long weight” and the other teacher would tell them “yeah, sure thing” and then just let the student wait there.

11

I lost 21 grand on a trade because I wrote down a P as an R or vice versa. Shocked I wasn’t canned for that.

12

These were all from jobs I had 15+ years ago, and none while with my current employer:

-Being drunk and/or stoned during work (OK, it was only a pizza/cheesesteak place at the beach in the summer, but still…)

-Having sex at work, both while on duty and off duty

-Rifling through personnel files, mine and others’

-Throwing out a couple fairly important documents that I forgot to act on, and claiming that I never received them.

13

I flipped off my boss and he flipped me one back. But I hand two hands and he only had one. So I gave him two. Hah…

His wife did want me fired, but the GM agreed the boss asked for it. So I didn’t get fired, but it was iffy for a couple of days.

14

I currently work in a similar industry. Making microchips and such, I mean. Anyway a few years ago there was a woman that worked at my factory that got caught stealing similar scrap, only unlike you she knew what she was stealing and was trying to make a little profit on the side. Long story short, it ended up getting back to my company and she got fired, sued, and sent to jail for theft.

15

My alma mater’s alumni association refused to grant a charter to the GBLT alumni because they felt that would tarnish their image. Outrage! My BFF at the time had started a little subversive, underground newspaper and this was the headline article she was researching. I worked as an intern in the school’s PR office and actually had access to the memo from the PR VP to the alumni association VP advising against granting a GLBT Alumni Association charter for the reason stated above. So I leaked an internal document to the reporter. The story was published about a week before graduation… which was also about a week before two solid years of internship would have ended. Had I been fired, not only would I have lost my job, but I wouldn’t get credit for two years’ worth of PR work/internship either. Fortunately for me, I’d already gotten credit for another internship, so I was willing to throw it all away if I was exposed as the source. The day that edition of the paper came out, my boss called me into her office. She knew I was friends with the reporter and she knew I was GLBT friendly. I pointed out that the story had said it was a memo from one office to another, so logically, there was a copy of this memo in both offices, and she could very well have had a contact in the alumni association office. “Can’t prove it” was basically my defense. She had some other weak “evidence” which I was able to convincingly shoot down. I think she knew damn well I was guilty as a thieving dog, but couldn’t prove it and knew there was a lot for me to lose and the benefits of pursuing it were nil – all involved graduated within a week so this would be a nonissue by the time school started back up in the fall. She let it go.

16

Writing up a rejection for a patent application often involves answering arguments from the applicant (or, more often, the applicant’s attorney) regarding previous rejections that were made in the case. I used to have a really bad habit of typing snarky responses to really inane arguments and then deleting them and typing my real responses. Once, I accidentally left the snarky comment in when I posted the case to my supervisor for review.

The argument was something like “The Jones patent cited by the examiner does not include the gizmo including first and second thingamabobs” when the Jones patent explicitly included the phrase “the gizmo includes first and second thingamabobs” word-for-word and I had quoted and cited this line in my previous rejection. In frustration, I began my response to the argument with “Applicant is apparently illiterate or blind, because the Jones patent clearly states…” and forgot to delete it.

My supervisor returned the rejection to me for revision with that passage underlined and the word “NO!” written in big red letters, but no other action was taken. My officemate later told me that the supervisor had thought it was funny and asked him if he had put me up to it, but another supervisor or another day could have gotten me in serious hot water and I shudder to think what would have happened if my supervisor had missed that part and mailed it to the applicant like that.

17

“fucked” with peoples food/drinks who treated me like a bag of shit to kick around because I was serving them. In my 5 year restaruant stint I only did this twice. I had asshole customers before but this was saved for the cream of the crop of assholes. It allowed me to keep on taking the abuse with a smile until they left my bar.

18

Back at my first two jobs in the late seventies-early eighties. Got stoned at lunch, came back to work high, boss knew we were doing it, overlooked it, but that was more accepted at that time.