I was working in the IT admin office for a time while doing software development, and got to witness this guy who came in to have his laptop fixed/swapped; and he said “You guys don’t like, check the laptops for files and stuff, right?”.

And the IT guy was legendary, didn’t skip a beat, was like “Nah, nah, we don’t have time for that crap.”.

As soon as the guy was out of the room, we checked his laptop’s files.

Porn. So much porn. Like, gigs of it, and this was in the early 2000’s when that meant a lot.

We went to HR, and they called him up and reviewed, and SOMEHOW, he dodged the bullet and they retained him. The reason? It was his porn. You read that right. He had gigs of porn of him banging his stripper GF on his laptop, and because it wasn’t “downloaded” porn, he got off.

Then a month later he was let go when he was found taking pictures with his cell phone over the cubicle wall of a female employee without her knowledge.

But I’ll never forget the mental gymnastics that happened to convince HR that porn only meant pictures of “other people” being naked, not himself and his GF.

A kid got fired for finding a pen on the ground. Person returned for the pen and then called corporate claiming the kid stole the pen

OK, so we were having a Christmas luncheon at work. HR made the flyer. It said “Holiday” party. Somebody felt that was part of the war on Christmas, and crossed out Holiday and wrote Christmas. That wasn’t the issue. Another guy took offense to that guy, and made a counterfeit flyer for the company Cthulu summoning. It said that the human sacrifice would be at 12, lunch at 1 so bring a change of clothes. He posted those all over.

That’s a firing.

Oh boy, I’ve seen a few:

• At a startup, one dude had obviously lied about his credentials. He was hired as a writer, but couldn’t write shit. He spent the entire day hitting on women and bitching about how his ex wanted support for a child he wasn’t convinced was his. He was fired about 3 days in…

• When I was a student, I worked at a sports store. One girl there was, let’s say, packing in the chest compartment. She was also about 17, maybe 18. Most people were nice enough to not hit on her, but one day the security guard (who was maybe late thirties at the youngest) made a comment to me to say “I would absolutely destroy her back door, you know?” (but slightly more graphic). I told management, and she was brought in. She broke down, and went over all the off-hand comments he’d made to her. The manager immediately walked out, told him he was fired, and apologised to her.

• An old employer hired this guy who was a Microsoft MVP nominee. The guy was one of those types that could talk brilliantly, but couldn’t take criticism. He listened to me, as I was senior, but ignored anything from managers or people at his level. To cut a long story short (I could write a book on this guy, and it would be hilarious) he lied about a project he worked on solo for six months. After checking in on his work we found he had bypassed our PR system and had been accepting all of his own requests, so no one has verified his code. It was an absolute mess. It cost the company a quarter of a million, for a project that should have brought in £50k. We later found out he was a nominee because he was so active on some Microsoft support forums, and mostly got that through posting “yeah I had the same problem” or from supplying easy or wrong answers. That loophole was closed shortly after…

Not quite fired but close enough. I know a guy who had gotten his 100% disability from the military during his first enlistment (basically only worked for about 2 years and then medical said he was borked so he was going to collect a paycheck for the rest of his life)

Then he popped positive for smoking weed on a random drug test and lost it all. Now he’s being discharged on an ‘other than honorable’ which means he loses all his benefits.

I worked in a glasshouse for a while. Since everything is glass, and the temperature is pretty high, the new guy went to change his pants from long ones to short ones. The son of the boss, who just started recently, decided he did not like it and fired him on the spot.

I thought it was really stupid. Unfortunately there was no talking him out of it. The guy was hard to work with, and part of the reason I quit that job later.

I once long ago worked in the incoming mail department for are insurance company. It was basically data entry.

Thing was, there wasn’t enough work.

There were two teams of five, plus a supervisor for each team, and a manager above them.

So what would happen was, we would arrive in and go to our spots, a few minutes later the main would arrive. Most days there was 100 pieces of mail to process, a really busy day may have twice this amount.

Even the most complex items would take me 10 minutes to process. The bulk was around 3 minutes, given the above, could personally have processed all the mail on an average day, with 3hrs to spare for complications.

On an average day, I got in the order of 30-40 minutes of work.

On slow days, it was more like 20.

I started coming in late, sleeping at my desk. Wandering around, going up to the upper management offices and the roof.

I eventually got fired, after months of this behaviour. Not because I was underperforming, no! I got fired, because I was “effecting the moral of the team”

I can see the point of why I was fired. I was an arse, I wasn’t suitable for the role.

I worked in a call center for an internal support team. We had a group that started early in the morning since our headquarters was on the West Coast and calls would come in really early from the East Coast offices. Every Friday we would organize a group order for breakfast from a local diner and I usually was the one who would go and pick it up (long before DoorDash). One particular morning the order was missing a side of bacon for one of the team members. This person got so angry that they didn’t have their bacon, they decided it would be a good idea to call the diner from the middle of our office while most agents were on the phone with end uses. They proceeded to yell at and lecture the poor diner worker who answered the phone saying things like “You forgot my damn bacon, I think you did it on purpose” and “What are you gonna do to fix this?” The call lasted a couple minutes as most of us were looking at one another in shock. Unsurprisingly, they did not return on Monday and we all couldn’t believe someone was fired for missing bacon.

There was a car wash service nearby where I lived, it was places at the end of supermarket parking lot. They got luxury Dodge Challenger car to polish its rims. An employee of that car wash decided to take a ride and crashed the car on a tree. He didn’t even have driving license.

Link in Polish, there are pictures, use translator for details: https://wroclaw.naszemiasto.pl/pracownik-myjni-rozbil-na-drzewie-luksusowe-auto-klienta/ar/c1-7527497

There’s a linux command, called “touch” which sets the timestamp on a file. It’s used for several things, including testing that the user has write privileges and that the filesystem is working.

I heard of a sysadmin who used to use “touch kids”, creating or updating the file ‘kids’. Some sort of internalised joke, I assume. His boss told him not to because it was inappropriate. Then again formally when he kept on doing it. Dude couldn’t stop, like some form of muscle memory. Kept on using kids as a test filename.

So yeah, he got sacked pretty quickly.

Worked at IBM. Co-worker was in the datacenter, saw a bluescreened machine, and rebooted it. Much chaos ensued. Machine was part of a stability testing project, team running it was OTW to the DC to look at the machine, and were very confused when they arrived that it was running. “Helpful guy” was chastised, given a warning about touching machines that weren’t his responsibility.

Two weeks later. Same guy. Same machine. Same bluescreen. Guess what he did? He rebooted it. Again.

Walked to the door that day.

I got fired for reading the newspaper during my lunch break. Once a week this newspaper came with a for hire section that also included career advice and al that stuff. I was reading that part but the CEO called me into his office to tell me off. I called his bluff and he fired me.

I was scheduled to lead a team in China for a few weeks and after that had to go to the US for some other job. Sadly people that are fired can’t work off premises anymore so the staff manager begged me to accept their withdrawal of my discharge.

I kindly declined and got payed out a years’ wage. Took the time to reorientate into less toxic work environment. I now work with politicians, don’t know what happened there.

We had one new guy getting fired for “refusing to talk to people who don’t have a university degree”.

Posting a selfie of himself holding a burger and a pop next to the “No food, no drinks, no photographs” sign in the secure datacenter?

I worked with a guy who’s wife had just had a baby and the baby was sick. The guy was very good at his job but was working from home without really asking permission. We have some leeway in this matter but technically he didn’t clear it. His supervisor really had it in for him and was trying very hard to get him fired for falsifying his time card. I don’t know why he didn’t like him, but the supervisor was a real ass. It may have been racist motivation, but I’m not sure.

I should point out that I had asked this guy to do some work for me that I didn’t have the capability to do and this guy approached it in such a unique way that the customer and some universities were really interested in his work. This is a defense contractor environment where every working hour has to be accounted for. Whenever I asked the guy a question whether via email or telephone, he always responded immediately. It was all computer code so I didn’t see a problem with this.

When he came into work and told me what was going on I immediately contact the manager on his behalf.

Well bottom line is that management pretty much dropped the subject and the supervisor was walked out of the facility. Turns out he had been falsifying his own time card the whole time. How’s that for hypocrisy?

Justice served.