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.

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.

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.

Some office administrative was going to be fired, but due to timezone confusion all her accounts were terminated before HR got to the office.

For half of the morning somebody had to pretend to be checking with IT why her computer didn’t work.

This is technically fired, but it’s more like quitting. It doesn’t perfectly fit this thread but I love telling this story.

A few months into my first real job, the engineers got their raises (not me, I was new). 0%, after record profits, the team busting their ass and working insane hours, and promises of good raises. I think they got some gift cards or something.

One of my coworkers goes back to his desk, packs some stuff, walks to his car, and doesn’t come back. He got paid for a full month before they finally fired him. We got a beer after and he was like “oh I don’t think I’m gonna go back” in the most Office Space way

It was me, I left a bad review for the pizza place I was working for. Owner was pissed, but to be fair I waited 2 damn hours for my delivery and when it still never showed up I just cancelled the order. I wasn’t even getting a deal on it.

Working at a call center and we had bonuses for people that could book the most hotel rooms (hotels.com). This one lady suddenly started winning all the bonuses day after day. This went on for almost 2 weeks. Then the FBI showed up. Turned out she was just stealing people’s CC numbers and booking them hotel rooms without them knowing.

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.

Harvey’s Hamburgers counted the times I punched in 1-3 minutes past my official start time (despite me being there 20 minutes in advance all times) as being “late” and fired me based off of this.

The two other employees were both pregnant with the manager so I have a suspicion that I got fired because at that time I couldn’t get pregnant. I still can’t get pregnant now because I’m a man, but I also couldn’t get pregnant back then.

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.

The last time I was a team lead, I would sit in on meetings and whenever this one admin assistant was present she would complain about an analyst’s appearance saying things like he looked disheveled because his shirt had some wrinkles; but he was very much silicon-valley/california-shabby-chic fashioned for the time.

We got bought out by a bank complete with stereotypical old fashioned management and dinosaur sensibilities from the East Coast. She brought up the analyst again during one of our meetings that included the new management and the analyst was fired the next day.

One of my regular customers is a factory that’s been around 100+ years. My contact there was a maintenance man who retired and was difficult to replace. The young guy that replaced him gets caught jacking off on security cameras. They give him a stern warning and he gets caught jacking off again. Fired.

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…

Someone secretly took a photo of someone else because they didn’t like the shirt and sent it to so many people not realizing they all liked the person and immediately told them. He had HR involved within minutes and she was fired. All of that happened in about 20 minutes of the photo being taken. There is a strict policy on photos of other people at work that has its own training we all do annually.

For those wondering about the shirt

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.