I’m a helicopter mechanic. I started a turbine helicopter engine to prove an entire shift of mechanics, quality assurance (“subject matter experts”) and managers they’re dumb. Then wrote a mean pass down insulting all of them, highlighting how many man hours, our time they’ve wasted, and how they made us all look stupid in front of the customer (US Marines.)

At the time I was the night shift QA. I got to work and they told me we’d be replacing an engine that was bad, it wouldn’t start (they left the ignition circuit breaker in, so no spark) but worse it was now leaking out of the thermocouples.

I says, you flooded the engine; there’s not supposed to be liquid fuel in that section. If you followed the procedures in our manuals you’d know how to blow the engine out to dry it then it would start.

They’d already called the higher level engine maintenance squadron to confirm the engine was bad. I was talking to the site lead, Dave, I bet him a dollar I could start that engine. At the time I was the only person on the site with an engine turn certification. He says alright, try it.

The Marines were already there. They determined nothing was wrong with the engine. I said, since you’re here want to watch me light it off. They said yeah. I went through the flooded engine start and it started and ran up perfect.

Next day I come in and Dave tells me I’ve been fired. There was one sentence in our rules that said only pilots could start engines. BUT Dave went to bat for me, explained the situation including that they certified me to run engines. He got it turned into two week suspension and a demotion, but I had so much PTO saved up he was going to pay me during it.

I came back and was now just a mechanic. Which was alright since I never liked the rest of the QA department. I got less responsibility, got to listen to audio books and ding wrenches together. Every now and then the other QA inspectors and managers would come to me with questions and I’d get to say, “I’m sorry, I’m not paid enough to know that.”

Worked as a cashier and manually entered the price for a cheesecake as $2.99 instead of $3.99. I only made that mistake once, and was fired for it even though I worked there for two years.

They told me they have a zero-tolerance policy regarding this. They even called in one of their security professionals to investigate, pulling footage of me and everything.

Fuck you, King Kullen.

Throwing the CTO who committed fraud, was about to commit more fraud AND couldn’t keep his hands to himself (he’d like to “tickle” all the male employees all day everyday and nobody dated to stop him) under a big fat bus (figuratively)

He fired me before he got fired himself and then about a year later I heard that he ended his own life.

Sorry, not sorry, no regrets.

The story that went around bravo is so much more entertaining than the truth.

I created a satirical Employee Handbook that, among other things, mocked the entire management chain and codified some of the unwritten rules among employees.

It was a crappy retail job so no real loss.

I got fired from Starbucks for not smiling enough back in the late 90s. To be fair, I have a pretty bad case of Resting Bitch Face, so I get it.

I work in events, last act was on the stage, so I started breaking down the equipment at the control booth that the last act wasn’t using. Pretty standard affair.

Apparently because I could be seen by the audience it was disrespectful to the act on stage and I was fired. I have continued to break down equipment that isn’t being used in every job since, and no one has batted an eye. He was a dick employer so I guess that makes sense.

Worked for a small llc and the owner spent to look good with customers but was super stingly internally. He wanted laptops reformatted quickly and turned around because he did not want it wasting not doing anything. A big guy at the company left and specs were better the higher you went so he wanted it quickly turned over to a top developer. This guy was important and I even varified with the second highest guy at the place to make sure it was alright. Whelp it turned out that guy who left had really important stuff that he did not put on his local backup disk or the networked storage (which I had backed up regularly on a rotating schedule). Bossman wanted me to take responsibility for it and im like. Um no. I formatted it but you told me to and I even got confirmation because quite frankly I thought it was a bad idea. Yeah so dick I guess was able to tell his customers that it was the fault of this underling IT guy.

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.

I got modernized out of being a parttime worker at the library, when they switched from barcodes to RFID and they didn’t need someone to scan the books anymore.

Which was kinda sad, because while that was boring, helping people find stuff was great. It’s been nearly 20 years and I still can’t stand an unalphabetised bookshelf, or one where the spines don’t line up.

Nowadays, I’m a safety consultant, and I get to fire clients. The most fun one was when they copied my signature on a plan that I specifically told them was illegal. I found out when I got a letter saying I committed environmental crimes for agreeing to said plan.

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.

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.

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”.

Having a chronic life threatening illness. Multiple times.

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.