I want to hear your (preferably real) reasons you got fired.
Got fired once for denouncing Christianity in the work place and telling the manager to fuck off and leave the person that practiced Hinduism alone. The weekend of said situation I was accused of stealing money from the register and fired on my day off.
Was 19 back then didn’t know I had a good claim against the manger and AutoZone.
Ha. Almost got fired from Advance Auto for similar issue. Me and this dude closed one night, next day manager says “$100 was missing from last night’s drop. It if appears by Friday, I’ll forget about it, otherwise you two are fired.”
Well I didn’t take it and never heard another word about it, so either dude put it back or manager realized the mistake and dropped it.
I quit when I put a padlock on the oil container that customers used to pour used oil into. Came in every single day to a fucking oil mess, so I locked it and put the key up front and a note to see an employee for assistance. Next day, lock is gone, oil mess again. Said fuck it and left.
Dating my now wife. The company refused to admit that was the reason. My bosses boss, who called to notify me of my termination while I was home sick, gave me some weird spiel about me “overstepping my authority” and refused to elaborate further. But I’m 99% sure that was why even though we violated no official company policies, because my [now] wife was fired on the same day. They took a really dim (albeit unwritten) view of dating between employees. Even ones that worked in different departments, at different offices.
Ironically, VP’s banging their secretaries on the side, with everyone knowing, was apparently fine.
Didn’t really matter. They kept telling me to do things that I considered unethical and I kept telling them “no” so it wasn’t going to last. They lost a good employee. I got a good wife. As far as I’m concerned, I came out on top.
I thought workplace relationships were good for companies
I had a contract that went unrenewed for no reason after I turned down the advances of the boss’s wife (she was a hot mess)
I was the lunch bartender and I arrived at the restaurant early to buy breakfast. I’m sitting down, off the clock, eating breakfast and my manager comes back and tells me there’s people at the bar. Bar doesn’t open until 11 (it’s 9:30) and I’m not on shift until 10. Manager says “You’re here, bar’s open.” So I finished my breakfast and head to the front. Before I can get a word out, before I even see the customers ones yelling “where ya been we’ve been here forever. We need bloody Marys, stat.”
Me" yes, of course. I just walked in the door. All the stuff’s in the back and I’ll probably have to prep some of it. So just sit back, relax, and I’ll be right back with those."
“What the fuck does that mean?” Says the alcoholic
“It means it’s gonna be a minute.” At this point I’m still off the clock, can’t clock in until 5 minutes before your shift without a managers card. Manager is walking by. I say “Manager, can I see you in the side server station?”
“Why?”
“I’d prefer not to discuss it here.”
“Just tell me what you want”
“I want to clock in and I need your card”
Upon hearing this the two get up, turn to the manager and ask “are you the manager?” And proceed to tell her all about my bad attitude. I didn’t get a chance to clock in.
This was a time where they were looking for any excuse to fire anyone, they let like 10 people go that week. A few months later the place was out of business.
Nice. Wonderful management
I got fired from a call centre on my first day because nerves got the better of me.
We were on a very strict schedule for taking breaks and making outbound phonecalls. I stumbled my way through a few calls until my break time (we started late in the day to help ease us in). When I came back, I delayed for about 5 minutes because my nerves were shot. Stumbled through another 3-4 calls and then my supervisor came up and told me to grab my stuff and follow him.
He took me down to the managers office where I was ripped into for taking too long on my break. I admitted to this, saying that I was nervous. He also accused me of not even greeting people on a few occasions and failing to say the important part about calls being recorded. I found it incredulous that I would forget to even say hi to a person, but I genuinely couldn’t remember so I couldn’t really argue with it.
I was fired there and then. Had to give my pass back and leave the building immediately. I was stunned when it happened, but I quickly got over it and realised that it would have been a really shit place to work anyway. I wasn’t even given a second chance or the benefit of the doubt.
That manager fired me believing that my actions were malicious and that I was lazy, he didn’t believe that I was a nervous teenager who made genuine mistakes. That was the part that pissed me off.
The fact that he took time to rip into a new employee on their first day rather than just fire you says more about them than you
This particular company no longer exists so I guess that makes me feel somewhat vindicated! They folded around 2017 which was a few years after I was there.
They put you on the phones live on day 1? That’s a “them” problem, not a “you” problem.
Nope, I should have clarified that I got fired on my first day of actually going live on the phones. Prior to that, me and the group of new people I was placed in got 2 weeks of training. For whatever reason, I struggled with it and never fully got to grips with what they were expecting of us.
In my defence though, I did warn the supervisor that I wasn’t feeling confident or ready to get started. He was one of those cringe overenthusiastic supervisors who was all about pizza parties and “smashing our goals”. He insisted that I would be fine. I really wasn’t lol
You’d think after 2 weeks sunk cost they’d give you at least a couple days to settle into a routine.
Was in the hospital for two months with mono. In ICU on a respirator for 4 weeks of that.
Was fired from my job, evicted from my apartment, and my girlfriend at the time decided to cheat on me while I was in there.
Good times.
Man, hope you’re doing fine now
Much better, aside from some residual health issues from the visit.
One of my first jobs, I wanted to take off for my birthday (I was young and cared about birthdays then). I did it well in advance and followed proper procedure, but my manager told me last minute that I couldn’t have it off because he was going on vacation. I told him that I wasn’t coming in and he said that if I didn’t that I would be out of a job. So I didn’t go in, and guess who ended up having to cover for my shift anyway? 🙃
The district manager called me personally the next week to hire me back because my numbers were quite good, and they put me in a different location.
Mid 1970s, I was 18 years old and driving a Pepsi delivery truck, fully loaded. Three-on-the-tree transmission and tarps over the truck’s loading bays.
Made a left turn too quickly and too sharply, and dumped 200 cases of cans all over the road.
That was it for my pop delivery career.Looked like it popped off quickly but fizzed out in the end.
And hence, canned.
Only once when I was young and it only lasted 4 hours.
I was at a LAN party and slept in as you do on the floor of my friend’s basement. I had forgotten entirely about an opening shift I had taken that Sunday morning at the pizza joint I worked at.
I woke up to multiple missed calls and a voicemail saying if I didn’t show up in a couple hours, don’t bother showing up again.
I showed up anyways and apologised. Got my job back and boss clearly felt bad for firing me for a single fuckup in the heat of the moment. So he also gave me a raise instead of firing me for “having the balls to show up again” as he put it.
¯\(ツ)/¯ A whole 25 cents!! Nice.
But you also had unlimited access to the most coveted of all employee benefits: pizza party!
A small plumbing and HVAC company I was working for got bought out by a larger firm that mainly focused on electrical work. When business in the plumbing department slowed down, they decided to shut it down and lay off all of us plumbers.
That turned out to be one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. Now I’m self-employed, running my own handyman business - exactly what I’d be doing if I could choose freely. The pay isn’t as good, but I work fewer hours, don’t have anyone to answer to but myself, and I actually get genuine gratitude for the work I do.
Working for yourself is the best!
Decades ago. I was younger and very dumb. A friend and I worked at a Coleman factory. We worked metal punch presses that punched out stuff for their stoves.
One day we thought it would be a good idea to do LSD to break the monotony. Buddy says come here look at this. He was offsetting the metal in the die and it would mash it into weird shapes. I started to do it too. Well long story short he broke a 10 thousand dollar die, we both got caught and we were summarily fired.
“Oops”
Took 6 days vacation instead of 5 I had “accrued”. I didn’t get paid for vacation in any case. I was working in construction. Company folded a year later; I can’t think why.
The other reason was “insubordination”. Can’t get into that with out sharing too much, but Texans are a special type of ignorant.
Not fired, but got chosen from a team for contract termination.
Was part of a team on contract doing software development for a hospital conglomerate’s internal tools when my second kid was born six weeks early. They made it clear that they were totally fine with me working reduced hours while we dealt with that. We were based halfway across the continent from them, so all our work was done remotely anyway. I put in about four weeks of reduced hours from the NICU, then came back up to full time (somewhat off-schedule, since we had a new baby in the house).
Come budget time, they felt they needed to reduce the team size. They felt we’d all done outstanding work - so I got the axe, because of my “reduced availability”.
I don’t know where you live but that sounds illegal as fuck
Probably America. Employment rights are a fairytale over there
Fairytale? We don’t even have that.
Do you mean the one they use to make women die from pregnancy complications?
The fun with contract work is that there are often laws in place to protect the employee, but there’s always some caveat that the employer can use to just not extend the contract anymore.
In Australia the law is that you can only extend a contract worker once, with what I assume is the intention that you would then hire them permanently if you liked their work enough to extend them. What actually ends up happening is that contract workers are now looking for jobs more often because companies LOVE contract workers, but hate the idea of offering anyone a permanent position. It’s cheaper for them to roll through inexperienced contractors.
Cheaper on the top line. But the entire MBA class is conditioned to believe myopia is a virtue.
There is no future beyond the next fiscal quarter.
A dumb one when I was younger.
Get a whatever job and go to training, get the uniform, they tell me they’ll let me know what day I start when they get the schedule.
Two weeks pass and I ask about it again. They get bothered but insist they’ll reach out to me when I get scheduled.
A monthish goes by and I run into a co-worker I saw at training. I chuckled and said they still haven’t reached out to me. She says what are you talking about, I’ve been scheduled every week for the past month, and that I should have checked the schedule book in the managers office.
At that point I was already looking at other work so I didn’t ever follow up again. I’d assume they fired me at some point.
Having a chronic life threatening illness. Multiple times.
I did a good job preparing for Y2K. So good that they outsourced all IT once it was clear that we were successful.
Another time I made the mistake of getting paid what I was worth. They found a new guy to do the same for much less. He left within 6 months for a job that paid a reasonable amount.
