Someone got hired as an IT Support Desk Technician. On his 5th day, he told the CEO that this job was temporary and he had no intentions of staying as he wanted to work in IT in a school.
5 minutes later he was fired.
That is stupid from both of them.
Dont tell your boss you dont expect to be there long.
Dont expect your workers to want to be there long unless you offer good options to advance and educate themselves. Especially for a help desk job… that’s very often an entry job to get a foot into the IT door.
That’s not a silly thing though. Pretty much all jobs are temporary.
I’m at an MSP that services quite a few school districts. We lose techs to them somewhat regularly.
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.
Eastern and Western US work ideals clash all the time. I’m in CO and we are definitely a we work to play state not we live to work and I haven’t seen an actual suit worn by anyone other than a lawyer around here, even at church. As soon as someone from the east coast shows up it’s painfully obvious. We don’t have much tolerance for their go, go, go ways and usually show them a great time and a relaxed vibe to relax them a bit. They’re always perplexed at how we can perform so well with such a relaxed attitude. Doesn’t usually click that it’s correlated.
colorado felt like another silicon-valley-ish niche to me so this makes sense, but i’m surprised to hear about the work perspective because the people i worked with in colorado tended to have more socially conservative views than my californian colleagues complete w an early-to-bed-early-to-rise work ethic.
the denver-boulder area, in person, is hard to distinguish from places like austin if not for the climate and geography; the general attitudes of strangers towards me made that place no different than anywhere in texas for me.
Wait… People don’t have a work-to-live attitude in CO? I live in NC where everyone works their lives away. Are you telling me I can move, even within the US, and that’s not the case? I know NC is terrible for workers, but if it’s that much of a discrepancy then I would pack and go elsewhere asap.
First thing I got told when I moved from NoVA to CO as a manager was people work to play. That has proven true time and time again. Snows a lot, everyone calls out and hits the slopes. Gorgeous day and they’ve just recently stocked a favorite fishing spot? Calls out to fish. Hunting season and got one of the lottery elk tags? Puts vacation in or unpaid time off since they’re extremely hard to get and goes off trying to bag and elk ok the western slope. Recently upgraded your Jeep? They’re definitely taking it off road on a mountain trail stat. Yeah, we have a ton of fun out here.
Also Colorado. Granted, covid didn’t give me much opportunity here but I wore a suit this summer for the first time in about 5 years. It was a wedding and I was the officiant 🙃
Oh I’m sorry, weddings and prom are still very formal, true. But a lot are western wear these days. Good point.
Oh no, I wasn’t trying to disprove your point at all! Just showing how extreme the situation needs to be to justify a suit. From what I remember most of the guests didn’t wear a suit either, but I can totally see it being a thing on the east coast.
This feels like a bait question to get people to break the new “no politics” rule.
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.
What did your other coworkers do all day?
Pretend to work, or were incompetent.
Similar things happened to me too. Could finish day’s work in an hour. It was a small company, didn’t have extra work they could give me, didn’t like I was idle most of the time since we had co-working space. And didn’t increase my salary even through they said they’d increase based on performance on provisional period.
They finally increased salary after 9months (said they’d do it in 3-6), and it was nominally higher like everyone else. Resigned the next day. When I went back few months back to get something every face was new one except the upper management and their family.
So basically they count on people to leave in a year or two, so they can hire other batch of fresh graduates in low salary again.
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…
That reminds me of a guy at a company party that was making lewd comments about the head of HR. He told the guy next to him he’d f her so hard, sparks would fly out of her vagina. Didn’t realize he was talking to her fiancé. Then, proceeded to grope another female employee. When they called him I to the front office the next day, he honestly had no idea he was getting fired. He thought he was getting a promotion.
-
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.
the new guy went to change his pants from long ones to short ones.
Wait so was he fired for wearing short pants, for leaving with the intention of changing his pants, or because (the reason I initially thought the glass was relevant) the new guy changed his pants within view of the boss’s son through the glass walls?
It was because he went to the changing rooms to change his pants. So he was away from work like maybe 10 minutes.
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 have a similar story. One of the security guards was found to have a hard drive full of BDSM porn. When interrogated about it, she said “It’s not pornography. Those are my holiday photos.” And sure enough, she was the one holding the whip.
The compromise reached was that she wouldn’t put her holiday photos on her office computer any more.
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
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.
I fired someone for ignoring their work, falsifying the records, and instead driving around all day in the company van playing Pokémon Go. Yes, the van has GPS. Yes, they were aware of this fact.
I should add, they had worked there for nearly 30 years, and transferred to my team. The individual had probably been shirking their duty in this way for their entire career, but the Pokémon Go thing was going on for several years at least. Their previous manager didn’t look into why someone with barely any customers was always so busy.
This reminds me. My work relies on items coming from a courier service. Most of our couriers are pretty timely, coming when they are supposed to and only being late on occasion. One of our couriers just decides to occasionally randomly come 1-1.5 hours late (or longer…occasionally he has come 2 hours late which is insane…you could probably walk to the facility and back in that timeframe)…despite the place he’s supposed to be coming from being the closest of all the other couriers. Based on the time he is supposed to arrive to pick up his items at that facility, there should be plenty of time for him to get here. Hell, I could probably ride a bike back and forth to that facility and still make it with ample time.
Somehow, he is often the same level of lateness arriving from a facility 15 miles away than he was when he used to courerir things to us from a facility 90 miles away. The other couriers don’t do this.
He gets repeated complaints but nothing ever happens and he continues to stay employed. They switched his route to be the closest facility to try and help combat his lateness. I always wonder what in the fuck he is doing when he is crazy late like that. My guess is that he is always sitting down for a bite to eat somewhere when he is supposed to be working, but who knows what the fuck he’s doing. Pokemon Go is a funny possibility. One time he admitted to someone that he gets more money the later he arrives. So I’m thinking whenever he wants an extra buck then he arrives at some crazy time like an asshole.
I know someone who watched their coworker come into work absolutely hammered, sit at the front kiosk thing and yell at customers, piss their pants, and pass out. They didn’t have a job anymore when they woke up.
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
Did they not realize he wasn’t coming in anymore? How did he continue getting paid for a month?
Our boss was like “I’m sure he’s mad but he’ll cool off” for way too long lol
We also worked some insane hours across many locations so it wasn’t abnormal to not see your office mates for weeks at a time
There was a woman who was a retail store manager who just upped and left for the Congo. (Yes, really) Corporate didn’t fire her for a year. (Yes, really)
There was an ice cream party for the company. Those who attended were laid off.
I feel like I need more context. What???
It was a frozen yogurt company. The ice cream was a ruse to smoke out those not committed to the cause.
I’ve heard of similar things. Boss wants to see who is the least busy, so they do something like open an employee gym. Then anyone who uses it is fired, because “if you have time to use the gym, you’re not working hard enough.”
Exactly. There was also a puzzle table once. The higher boss said he loved to see people building teamwork and closer relationships and liked the puzzle. I luckily knew the whole time that even though he said this he fucking hated the puzzle. I winced everytime he’d catch someone working on it. Some people are just oblivious AF. “He said he likes the puzzle!” Yeah he said that, but he absolutely does not and you’re probably on the shit list now
What the hell? And how didn’t it ended in a massive lawsuit?
Assuming not-Montana US, you can be fired for any reason other than membership in a protected class (race, religion, etc). Attending an ice cream social, even a company one, is not a protected class.
Why??? I’m very confused!!
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 love this one
Omg, that’s hilarious!
Used to work at a warehouse driving lift trucks and forklifts. One guy out of nowhere turns into an aisle and smashes into a stack of 50" tvs. And this was back in the day when those things were like $2k each.
We go check on it and dude reeks of spiced rum. The stinkiest of liquors. He is shit faced. He had a bottle in his locker and kept going back for more. Fired on the spot.
Tbf that warehouse was wild, half the employees were ex cons and everyone was always doing stupid stuff
