• Tyfud@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    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.

    • spittingimage@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      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.

  • EABOD25@lemm.ee
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    2 days ago

    A kid got fired for finding a pen on the ground. Person returned for the pen and then called corporate claiming the kid stole the pen

  • MrAlternateTape@lemm.ee
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    4 days ago

    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.

    • MufinMcFlufin@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      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?

      • MrAlternateTape@lemm.ee
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        3 days ago

        It was because he went to the changing rooms to change his pants. So he was away from work like maybe 10 minutes.

  • absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz
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    4 days ago

    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.

      • thevoidzero@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        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.

  • Breadhax0r@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Not quite fired but close enough. I know a guy who had gotten his 100% disability from the military during his first enlistment (basically only worked for about 2 years and then medical said he was borked so he was going to collect a paycheck for the rest of his life)

    Then he popped positive for smoking weed on a random drug test and lost it all. Now he’s being discharged on an ‘other than honorable’ which means he loses all his benefits.

  • Zacpod@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    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.

  • phanto@lemmy.ca
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    5 days ago

    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?

  • PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca
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    5 days ago

    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.

  • herrvogel@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    I got fired when the company decided to downsize.

    “How is that dumb?” you ask? That happened less than two weeks after I was hired. The boss man’s speech indicated that that was the result of a long deliberation by corporate. So if you knew there could be layoffs any moment, why the fuck were you hiring?

    • Thorry84@feddit.nl
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      6 days ago

      This is usually done to keep things going as normal as possible for as long as possible. Once people start noticing something is wrong, the best people start looking elsewhere. Before you know it, not only is the company in financial trouble, but it can’t recover because some of the best people left. At least one time I witnessed, the company was working on layoff plans and even limited bankruptcy, but at the same time negotiating with the investment firm that owned part of the company to get more money. If they got the money, everything would be fine. It wasn’t till that fell through, they had to start laying people off.

        • Robust Mirror@aussie.zone
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          5 days ago

          Right but you’re trying to avoid them leaving before that in case you get a win and don’t need to make the lay-offs. If they leave earlier the win you’re hoping for may no longer be enough to save you.

      • qevlarr@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        Exactly. Companies are typically working on multiple conflicting scenarios because you don’t know which it’s going to be

    • Professorozone@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      Yup, I worked for a company that was laying off but they were still hiring because, “they had a hiring policy.” Absolutely nonsensical.

    • superkret@feddit.org
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      5 days ago

      What do you think would happen if the C-suite called HR and told them “we’re about to announce a downsizing in 2 months, stop hiring people”?

      • Professorozone@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        I worked for a company that did just that and it was the best way to do it because a lot of people left on their own.

        • superkret@feddit.org
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          5 days ago

          The problem is that this way, your best people with the most options leave first.
          Those you want to keep long enough to do the re-structuring and make the numbers on the books look good, so you can sell the company before it disintegrates completely.

          • Professorozone@lemmy.world
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            5 days ago

            Not always. I think the best people think they WON’T be let go and some others who don’t perform, figure they are on the chopping block.

            In our case it didn’t matter because they wound up having four rounds of layoffs before shutting that location down entirely. So it really wound up being WHEN you were fired, not IF.

          • Breadhax0r@lemmy.world
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            5 days ago

            Aren’t those people also the first to be let go? They’re the most expensive and you can maximize short term profits by letting go to expensive employees and hiring on cheap ones.

  • frank@sopuli.xyz
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    6 days ago

    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

      • frank@sopuli.xyz
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        6 days ago

        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

        • Broken@lemmy.ml
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          5 days ago

          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)

  • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.ml
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    5 days ago

    At a place I worked at previously, there was a guy who got fired because the company found out that he had been hiding cans of beer in the water tank part of the toilet.

    Yes…you read that right, he would “take a bathroom break” so he could pound a beer a few times throughout the day lol.

    I wouldn’t critique it that much honestly, except for the fact that he operated heavy equipment for his job, so yeah, not safe at all.

  • bstix@feddit.dk
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    5 days ago

    We had one new guy getting fired for “refusing to talk to people who don’t have a university degree”.

  • Kalkaline @leminal.space
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    6 days ago

    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.

  • azvasKvklenko@sh.itjust.works
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    4 days ago

    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

  • superkret@feddit.org
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    5 days ago

    I have a co-worker (in an open, shared office) who

    • doesn’t react to tickets, Teams messages or emails
    • refuses to answer the phone even when the call is specifically for him
    • has only one specific task assigned to him, which he regularly fucks up but doesn’t care
    • sleeps under his desk for an hour every day during work time
    • plays music with offensive lyrics loudly, while others are on phone calls with customers
    • watches porn on his work computer
    • walks over to co-workers, farts, then walks back to his chair

    He’s been with the company for 20 years.

    • Ziggurat@sh.itjust.works
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      5 days ago

      The trick is within the company for 20 years. If you’re the guardian of some ancient forgotten but critical knowledge, you become impossible to fire

      • superkret@feddit.org
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        5 days ago

        He’s the guardian of some secrets about a very high profile company, involving some of the higher-ups.
        And also has an officially recognized disability, in a unionized company. It is big enough for them to hide him away from public view, rather than risk him airing their dirty laundry in the court case that will come if they fire him.

        • Broken@lemmy.ml
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          5 days ago

          The best move for management in this situation is to “promote” him, into a new role that segregates him from the rest of the team. No office space work in the basement thing, but something that makes him distinctly a different role/title, and physically gives him a small office down the hall.

          It doesn’t sound like much, but any physical distance will be nice for you and others like you. It also removes depression when you know he’s the same role but not held to the same standards. Eventually all that crap takes its toll, and good people quit…or worse, they stop caring and don’t quit.

          The saying one bad apple can ruin the bunch is very true in work situations.