I’m notorious for having panic attacks over work because I’m afraid of doing something wrong. I’ll get worried about giving a customer too many ketchup packets, or not getting the tables cleaned fast enough or making a typo in a non-vital document that my boss only used for reference purposes.
However, having taken a look at this thread, I realize I probably shouldn’t be so worried.
Is it true that unless you steal, chronically lie, insult someone or are so incompetent as to that you make productivity go down drastically (like being hired as a cook and burning the food 50% of the time), it is hard to get fired?
Depends on the boss. I’ve been kept on at a job way past the point where I should have been fired but I’ve also (more often, as in twice) been let go for no other reason except “we can’t afford you” and “it wasn’t a good fit” when I hadn’t done anything wrong (and they admitted it). It really all depends.
You would think so, wouldn’t you? However, there was a lady at my old job on the third shift who would routinely sleep at her desk. Someone mentioned it to her supervisor, and he said he’d seen her do it and just shrugged. So that depends on the supervisor. I myself have been caught nodding once or twice during boring presentations, and it was just laughed off (but that’s just once or twice in the six years I’d worked there).
Another lady often fell asleep while working, and I was the one who caught her. I wouldn’t have said anything, except it was REALLY often, and she was having severe productivity and quality problems (I was her trainer). I did mention it to her supervisor, who had a talk with her and ended up moving her to the day shift.
**What would you fire a person for? **
I had a sleeper once. Eventually fired. Other than RIFs, the reasons for getting fired had to do with competence and dishonesty. Oh yes, I once fired a nut case who displayed paranoid behavior in the office. Had to call in security to escort him out of the building.
I’ve worked for the Federal Govt for virtually all of my adult life, and I’ve personally known only one person who was fired from civil service. He was, at least in name, a mechanical engineer. He routinely slept at his desk. He and I were assigned to work on a project. I went to him to arrange for a site visit - we were supposed to evaluate some equipment to see if it could be refurbished and reused or if it had to be junked. I stood beside his desk and he never looked up at me. He barely spoke to me. He didn’t show up at the visit. I honestly don’t know if he ever did his part of the project. He was soon transferred to another branch.
Some years later, I was talking with our boss and his name came up. He had been fired by that time. After he left my group, his supervisors started documenting his worthlessness. He was moved to at least one other branch that I knew of. One day, the boss saw him in the hall and said “Mike, come with me - we need to talk” and headed to his office. Apparently Mike turned down the next hallway and the boss didn’t realize it till he arrived at his office alone. :eek: I believe that was the proverbial last straw.
Last I heard, he was working at a hardware store. I’m wondering if he used a forged transcript - he had to be the worst engineer I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve known some bad ones.
I actually take a nap at work almost every day. But my bosses are quite sympathetic to my health issues and know that I put in more than my 8 hours anyway.
I have fired two people in the last 4 years for not being able to do their jobs. I have let go several contractors because I believe that a contractor should not be used as a full time employee and if I need a full time employee I should hire one. (Contractors/consultants get paid much more than full time employees. The reason stated for this is that by nature contracting is transitory and so they must charge more to try to even things out.) Of the contractors that I let go, at least two of them would have been fired if they had been full time employees. One for not being able to the job and the other for not cooperating and overall doing a poor job.
I fired my daughter once, in a vain attempt to get her away from a bad boyfriend. It didn’t work.
I worked for various nonprofits and law firms for about 30 years without ever seeing anyone get fired, even though there were several who probably deserved it. People who had problems with absenteeism, who did the bare minimum and expected others to pick up the slack, who fudged their time sheets, drank and did drugs on the job. The supervisors just hated confrontation and hoped that the problems would go away. Usually they did.
It wasn’t until the last place I worked that I encountered supervisors who fired almost as many people as they hired, sometimes for good reasons but mostly (it seemed) to assert their authority or to make room for the butt kissers. This behavior started when the business emphasis changed from quality, safety, and innovation to profit margin.
That makes me think that corporate environments might involve more firings than other businesses, but I could be wrong.
I almost fired a seasonal employee the other day for leaving a door unlocked. We had moved our engraving machines and computers and a ton of merchandise to an empty storefront for the holiday season, which necessitated having someone run back and forth from the store to the engraving site. He was the engraver, and was doing his own running…and left the room unsecured when he left to come to the store, and even when he went home for the day. Consistently. On his last day, he did it again, not a half-hour after I warned him about it. But there were only two hours left in his shif, and it was Christmas Eve, and I knew we’d never hire him again, so it seemed pointless to fire him and save $12 of payroll. We should have fired him weeks before. He misengraved more than we paid him. But earlier, it wasn’t my call, it was the managers, and she didn’t know how we would get through the season without him engraving, and she couldn’t be bothered to train anyone else.
In addition to his basic incompetence, we had a resettable combination padlock for the door, and one day he had a slow shift and played around with the lock, resetting the combination…but he had no idea what he had reset it to. Another $8 down the drain. And he didn’t even offer to replace it. Cute but dim.
Nope, at least not at the corporation I work at. I’ve been here nearly nine years, and I only know of a couple of people fired (of course, in a headquarters of 2,300 people, I’m sure there have been others I haven’t heard of). Plus once a CIO “decided to seek external opportunities” on a Friday afternoon, effective immediately.
What they do is wait until they feel they can justify a round of layoffs, then go through and clean house. They get rid of troublemakers, complete incompetents, or people that are just plain unliked by their managers. The last time, they got rid of some of the most expensive non-executives (long time programmers earning six figures) just to cut costs. That hurt, because many of those guys were very, very competent, and their absence was noticeable.
Here is one case that I found shocking. It happened at a schlock chain in Canada called Zeller’s. A guy found a box of chocolates past their pull date that were to be put in the garbage and he took them home to his kids. They discovered this and fired him. They said he did it without permission and he said it was abandoned and he could do anything he wanted with them. Whatever the legalities, the store has taken a lot of flak for this. They have strongly defended themselves, I don’t know why. Actually they called the cops and accused him of theft. I wonder if there wasn’t something going on they haven’t told us. Maybe they were looking for a reason to fire him.
Sleeping on the job must be an asset if your work for PENNDOT. Seriously-I was hired to repaint the interior of a firehouse some years ago. About 0900 every morning, the PENNDOT trucks would rumble in and park behind the station. Two dump trucks, another one with a flasher sign in tow, and the crew cab 3+3 sleepmobile. They would read the paper or sleep until noon, go get lunch, and then return until 1500, at which time they rolled out and presumably back to the maintenance yard. This went on the whole week I was there.
Itg should be obvious from all this that if you have reasonable people as bosses, you won’t be fired for minor fuckups, so long as you don’t repeat them constantly. If you have an asshole for a boss or you’re working for a firm that’s decided to cut workers, you can be fired even if you’re perfect. In short, it doesn’t matter how good a slave you are, it’s mostly a matter of who owns your ass.
Good pal works in FAMOUS COMPANY HR Department +4000 people are serviced. Anecdotally he has told me that just about every two weeks they fire someone for sending jokes, cartoons etc. on company email or paper that creates a hostile work environment. Almost always, except clear harassment cases, these idiots have gotten a warning not to do it/cut it the hell out. Almost always they are lower level Admin Asst./clerical/mailroom types – but not alwaysP:
In at least one case it was a 6 figure manager guy. A guy who now knows he lost his 6 figure job for being a chronic sender of dumb blonde jokes (or at least that was th straw that got him fired) AFTER BEING WARNED NOT TO DO THIS SORT OF THING— this is an absolutely astounding story to me as in how dumb can a guy be?
I’ve been fired once (actually, they told my temp company not to bother sending me back), and I totally deserved it. I’d just gotten into my first serious sexual relationship and was so dazzled by the whole thing (sex? Now? SURE!) that I kind of stopped showing up at work. Oh, I called in, but when one of your workers can’t be bothered to show up for half her shifts in a three week period…? And if that weren’t bad enough, I took a support call of a guy that wanted his email account deleted, and I didn’t verify his company ID. It never occurred to me that some asshole was pretending to be the guy and had the account deleted just to screw over said guy.
Yeah, I totally deserved getting canned.
Thankfully, since then, my employers have been sad to see me go (well, except the last job, but that’s a whole 'nother can of worms).
