Personally, I think having one absolutely unhinged, lawless coworker is a canon life event. What better way to bond with your colleagues than sharing looks of horror across the room, am I right?
NBC
Recently, Redditor u/aquatic_armageddons asked, “How did that one coworker get fired?” You know…that one. People in the comments had no shortage of workplace horror stories to share, and I rounded up 31 the very best of them right here:
Note: This post also includes stories from this previous post.
1.“When I was in high school, I worked at a car detail place. We worked with high-end cars. Think BMW and Porsche, cars like that. A guy brought in his Lamborghini one day. Boss said it’d be ready on Monday. The guy who owned the car was out with his wife Saturday night and saw his car pass by him on the road. Turns out one of the office guys took it out for a joyride. Dumbass really said he didn’t think he would get caught as they were leading him out the front door.”
2.“A 16-year-old kid was fired during his first day of training because he came in wearing a shirt that just said ‘BITCH’ across the front in giant letters. I mean, I know we have a casual dress code, but…”
3.“He peed into a coffee cup under his desk, despite his office being about 12 feet from the bathroom. How did it come up? Because he also left said coffee cup on his desk, and you could smell it just walking in.”
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4.“He was fired for trying to see how loudly he could scream. It was his first day. We were having a quiet day in the office; everyone was working. Suddenly, this guy screams at the top of his lungs. The HR office was right there. One of them ran to him to see if he was OK. He said, ‘I am OK, just wanted to see how loud I can scream.'”
5.“One of his coworkers wore a particularly flattering sundress to work. The next day, he told her, ‘Y’know, last night when I was fucking my wife, I was thinking about you in that dress.’ He was gone within the hour.”
6.“I worked in a pizzeria, and there was a new driver starting. When he came back from his first delivery, there were no other orders for him to take. So, I told him that in between, he would have to do dishes and clean. He replied, ‘That’s a woman’s work, I don’t do women’s work.’ And…..you’re fired.”
7.“At orientation, they told the 12 of us that we were the best and the brightest of 900 or so interviews they’d conducted. We got our access badges and our corporate Amex cards. Well, one of the ‘best and the brightest’ went to a high-end men’s clothing store on his lunch hour and purchased $4,000 worth of suits, ties, and shoes. He came back from lunch and bragged of his exploits. He was fired on the spot. He actually thought his Amex card was a job perk. And yes, he did have the nerve to ask, ‘Can I at least keep the clothes?'”
8.“The key to sales is to find a subject you can both agree on and attempt to close a deal from that point. My coworker was on the sales floor talking with a wealthy gentleman, and he was about to sell a very expensive item when both the sales guy and the customer noticed this very beautiful woman standing nearby. Maybe the sales guy took that moment to bring them together; I never had a chance to ask. The sales guy tells the customer, ‘That woman is so hot! I would f*** the *** out of her!” That customer was the woman’s husband!”
“To say that the customer became unglued would be an understatement. He verbally ripped into the sales guy, and it escalated to physical violence. Other employees ran up to break them apart. The manager and the district manager came rushing in. The manager talked to that guy for over an hour, attempting to smooth things over and make the customer happy so there were no repercussions. I think they sold the items at cost just to make the situation go away.
As expected, the sales guy was fired. What I didn’t expect was how the rest of us would suffer because of his comment. Mandatory training was hastily put in place to remind us all how sexual harassment in the workplace was a no-no and about proper conduct with customers. It reeked of covering their ass to deflect any possible lawsuit. Besides, the one guy who needed the training didn’t get the training.”
9.“I managed a smoothie place for a while and hired this kid for mornings. His first day, he was two hours late. He apologized, saying he was tripping on shrooms and got lost on the way to work. He also took 15 smoke breaks in the four hours that he worked. When his shift was over, I told him not to come back.”
10.“Guy had a job at a medical device company where he was supposed to be putting an anti-clotting coating on some of the products. He realized that he was basically unsupervised to do his work the entire day, so he eventually started a routine where he would clock in at the start of his shift, leave the building to do whatever else, come back at the end of the shift, just move all the products he was supposed to have coated from the ‘in’ pile to the ‘finished’ pile without actually coating them, and then clock out and go home. I know he was immediately fired when he was caught, and a bunch more security cameras went in to make sure nobody else tried something similar. Since it caused a major medical recall, I bet he got hit with a hefty lawsuit to boot.”
11.“I was a pizza delivery guy at a family-owned Italian restaurant. They brought a guy in to help make pizzas. Two hours into his training, he started talking about wanting to bang the waitresses. The waitresses were the daughters of the owner. The guy teaching him how to make the pizzas was the older brother. He was physically ejected from the building.”
12.“He brought his concealed carry into work and accidentally left it in the bathroom.”
13.“It was the morning of her second day, and she was visiting one of our production sites. She thought her work day was starting too early, so she called down to the local leadership team to say she’d be in that afternoon, if at all. She was on the next flight home instead.”
14.“I work in insurance. This person changed the ‘business description’ (which is listed towards the beginning of the Declaration pages) on every single policy related to animal processing they touched. Thousands and thousands of policies were all changed from ‘Animal Fat Rendering Plant’ or ‘Butcher-Retail & Distribution’ or ‘Dairy Farm’ to (in all caps): ‘SLAUGHTERS INNOCENT ANIMALS TO HARVEST THEIR PAIN.’ Turns out they’d been doing it since they had been hired YEARS ago and nobody in QA caught it.”
“I was given an Excel spreadsheet with all of these policies and told to take as much overtime as I needed to change them back. Took me days, but damn, what a good ($$$) Christmas it was that year.”
15.“After borrowing a pickup truck from our boss, he called out sick the next day. He was actually moving and using the truck to do so. He crashed it on a hard turn that he took way too fast.”
CBS / TV LAND
16.“I was working at a casino several years ago, and there was this really weird guy we worked with. Socially awkward as all holy fuck. Something about this dude always rubbed me the wrong way. I just always felt a touch uneasy around him and never knew why. I chalked it up to him just being a really odd guy and my lack of patience for his strange sense of humor. One day, I was the pit boss, and I saw him sitting at one of our blackjack tables. His phone was out, which is a red flag in the casino world. Before I could even start to walk over there, it looked like he raised it and took a pic of a female dealer’s butt. She was dealing a table on the opposite side of the pit, facing the opposite way from him.”
“I stopped for a second, then I called surveillance and told them what I thought I saw. They said they would investigate, and I didn’t hear back from them before the end of my shift. I was busy, so I forgot about it like 30 min later anyway, and went about my day.
Three days later, I was pulled into a meeting with my boss, his boss, and ownership. They told me that I was right and that he was doing exactly what I thought he was. They thanked me for being vigilant and bringing it to their attention. They didn’t go into a ton of detail, but they said that he admitted to it and more when they confronted him. They said he had done this to several other female employees and even showed them the evidence.
He was terminated and trespassed from the property, obviously. I haven’t seen him since, and that’s just fine with me.”
17.“They were an email server admin who fished out some juicy executive chatter and then sent it to every network printer in the company. They were escorted out kicking and screaming about the unfairness of bonuses and quid pro quo deals between leadership.”
18.“A high school friend of mine was hired at a pet shop. He got high during his lunch break, came back, and had some kind of epiphany. He took a look at the iguanas, lizards, rats, and whatnot in their cages and decided that it wasn’t right for them to live like that. Rather, he felt they should be set free to live in the wild where they belonged. So, he got them loose and let them free ‘in the wild,’ which was actually the streets of very urban Montreal. He got fired when the manager realized what he had done. The manager was unfortunately absent at the time of my friend’s courageous liberation. Most of the animals probably died and got run over.”
NBC / Peacock
19.“I fired him. He brought a grocery bag into the store with his weed pipe and his grinder in it, then tried to keep it in the walk-in refrigerator. I smoke, too, so I told him we wouldn’t have a problem if he could just have someone come pick it up from the store or put it outside somewhere. Seriously, I didn’t care. He still did his work, and I didn’t know it was there until I saw it with my own two eyes. Well, he threw a literal fit in response, so I told him I’d write him up. He got even more mad, so I told him to clock out and go home for the day. Then he threatened to beat my ass, so I fired him.”
20.“He was a general manager, and it was painfully obvious he wasn’t paying attention to any of the finance reports I was sending him. To test my theory, when margins slumped one month, I noted the reason as ‘poor cost control by local management.’ He never said a thing, but his superiors caught on.”
“As he was investigated for support to fire him, we found out he was having an affair with an employee of our main client and had given them ‘all access’ to our offices. There was graphic CCTV footage of our offices being used as their ‘love shack.’ He also had bogus company expenses and had misused his company car (using it to run a side hustle and not so much for our company’s business).”
21.“At onboarding, we were told not to take pictures of anything in the office, ESPECIALLY the first-party in-house proprietary software on everybody’s monitor, on pain of immediate termination So, of course, on their first day, this person took a selfie at work and posted it on Facebook. Their Facebook was public. In the selfie, a monitor with the aforementioned software running was visible. They were fired before the end of their first shift.”
“The wild part was that this kind of shit wasn’t even uncommon. I’ve seen people get fired for this exact thing at three different jobs.”
22.“This happened when I was working at McDonalds. New guy came in and when he saw that we were trashing patties if they had been sitting too long, he ate one…then he started just eating them from the supply…dude must have inhaled 10-12 patties over a couple hours after repeatedly being told to stop. Eventually, he started making himself a burger with the buns and eating it as well. Got fired first day on the job. I’m still convinced he had no real plans of working and just wanted to see how many free burgers he could eat before getting canned.
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23.“This was my first intern. I used to work at a very large consulting company that was famous (or infamous) for sending all of its interns to Orlando for a week-long onboarding/training session. This was to ostensibly train college grads on how to not lose clients as soon as they start, but it was also a great way to filter out people who….still lived spiritually in a college frat house. On my intern’s second day, he was called out of my training by HR. He came back pale as a ghost and told me he had a family emergency and needed to leave work. I never saw him again.”
“Later that day, I decided to crash a neighboring office’s happy hour (consulting actually encourages college-level drinking after the first year or so). A close friend was telling a hilarious story about an intern who got fired that day. Supposedly, the intern had come back to his hotel so drunk that he couldn’t find his room and tried to book a new room on the company card. A few other interns tried to save him by stashing his drunk ass in someone else’s room. He woke up in the middle of the night and tried to fight the original occupants of the room, who he was convinced were actually inside his room. Security was called.
As you can probably guess, this turned out to be my intern. HR never actually informed me that he got fired. RIP Blake, you were a scrappy one, and I have a feeling you would have actually handled my later projects well.”
24.“I had to fire a janitor on day one because someone spilled a cup of coffee, and he stared them directly in the eyes and yelled, ‘Fuck you!’ at the top of his lungs. He threatened to kill me after he was fired and stood outside of our workplace with a bouquet of flowers until we called the police on more than one occasion.”
25.“He accidentally e-mailed a steamy conversation between him and a female coworker to the entire company. This is also how he got divorced.”
26.“I worked at the stock exchange in a high-security environment, being exposed to high confidence info about ad-hoc news which could directly affect the prices of shares. All our private transactions and our bank accounts were monitored 24/7. One day, the door was opened, and the police rushed in, cuffed one of our coworkers, and left. We never saw him again. Apparently, he secretly tried to use the information for insider trading and got caught.”
27.“My company hired temps for a big job. We didn’t have a lot of space, so temps had to double up in cubicles. I did feel very bad for them, but some of their actions were hilarious and frankly terrible. The guy who got fired was chugging along with his task and his cubemate was sneezing or talking or something. Basically, she was making some noise. His reaction? To slap her. He was escorted out of the building. The next day, he showed up to work again as if nothing happened. He was escorted back out and told to please not return.”
28.“I used to work at a hotel. When I first started, there was another new hire along with me. Almost immediately, she started going up to guests and telling them sob stories about how she was broke and couldn’t afford to support her children — I think she had two or three of them — and actually solicited them for money. Needless to say, she was fired on her third day. I ended up lasting over 15 years.”
29.“This guy showed up drunk to work. He reeked of booze, and he was a delivery driver. Told him to go home and sleep it off. No harm, no foul, just take a day. He insisted he wasn’t. Again, I tried to talk him into taking the day off with no penalty. He was adamant. Offered to let him go home once more, or we would have him take a breathalyzer. If he didn’t blow straight 0’s, he’d be fired. He insisted he hadn’t drunk for days. Our boss’ husband was a cop, so he drove in to give the guy a breathalyzer. Once the cop was there, again, we offered for him to go home and come back tomorrow. He was 100% sure that he could pass the breathalyzer. He blew a .05 and was fired.”
30.“This was over 20 years ago. The coworker in question was an older guy, in his mid-50s. He was always nice to everyone, dressed to the nines, and drove a Jaguar. A bunch of guys in suits came into the office one day and went right to the manager’s office. After a few minutes, the manager and the men in suits walked over to his cubicle. The men asked him to stand up, turn around, and place his hands behind his back. He was cuffed and led off of the floor into a black SUV. We came to find out that when he was in the Marines, he stole the identity of one of his fellow Marines. That Marine lived abroad, and when he came back to the States, he found out his identity was being used for years.”
31.And finally, “I worked for a logistics company that specialized in transport computers. The guy left the depot on his first day, made his first delivery, went to the petrol station to fill up, left the keys in the cab when he went to pay, and returned to nothing more than an empty parking spot and bad work references.”
Do you have a wild story about that one coworker getting fired like these? Or, perhaps, were you that coworker? Either way, tell us about it in the comments below!