37 Employers Explain Why They Had To Fire An Employee (And The Stories Are Ridiculous)

1. This is incredible and you need to read this as the first story

In the 1990s I was managing the snowmaking department and supervised the crew for a popular ski resort. We worked 7pm – 7 am and by our first break (about 10pm) everything in our area was closed so you had to bring your lunch, snacks or anything else or you were up shit creek.

We had a new hire named Nino who was a huge Samoan guy. Nino was a damn hard worker when he wasn’t drunk. He showed up several times completely trashed and I’d send him home. (Employee housing which was within crawling distance) This really didn’t bother me because we had a badass crew and the slack was easily picked up.

Sometimes it was more trouble than it was worth having him there because of the crazy shit he would do.

Once, he drained a water line that held about 7500 gallons right onto the middle of a popular intermediate run. It was 6am when I discovered the massive glacier he had created. I had to go get a grooming cat and attempt to break it up before we opened. I roped off the area and finished clearing the ice at about 11am, well after opening. I covered for his ass because I felt bad for him and told the hill manager that it was a busted hose that caused it. This was strike 1 for him.

Strike 2 was when he decided it would be ok to try clean the inside of every grooming cat interior with lemon pledge. Seats, hand controls and all, including the windows. It took 3 hours to clean up that waxy, hazy shit.

Strike 3 was one of the most WTF incidents I have ever seen in the workplace. Nino showed up for work sober for once but started asking if anyone had any food. He hasn’t been to the store and had nothing in his shack in employee housing. At lunch (midnightish) he was nowhere to be found and didn’t show up when the break was over. We chalked it up to him going somewhere to get drunk.

At about 4am, I’m the only snowmaker near the main lodge at the bottom of the mountain when I hear an explosion somewhere near one of the chairlifts. I head towards where I heard this explosion and it was not a pop. Or a bang. It was a window shattering, car alarm tripping explosion. As I near the area where I heard this blast come from I see the flashlights from the security guards waving in all directions. I get to the chairlift and see this large naked man covered in what looks like shit and blood is flowing from his face. As I dismount my snowmobile I realize its Nino. He’s standing there naked and badly hurt. He starts screaming at me to help as he covers his face. There are fucking chili beans everywhere. I see the security guards running towards us and I’m on my radio with first aid getting the emts on the way.
I’m trying to look at Nino and calm him down. His face is a mess of blood, glass chili beans and a corn chip shaped piece of sheet metal embedded in the side of his head. The security guys are here now and they’re as bewildered as I am. We get Nino down to the day lodge deck where we lay him down on a rubber door mat. EMTs show up and get him packaged for transport.

As I go to leave the day lodge I notice there are chili beans all over the place, little clusters here and there, chili beans on the roof, windows and peppered all over the snow. I follow the intensity of the bean blast to the main chairlift nearest the lodge.

The “lift shack” which is the indoor control room for the chairlift (for you non skiers/boarders out there) looks like it had been bombed. This isn’t some old 1950s plywood lift shack either, this is a multi million dollar high speed quad “lift shack”. The windows are gone. The door is hanging on by only it’s lower hinge. Chili beans everywhere. And blood. It smelled like Taco Bell and burnt electronics. That fried amp smell, with cheese. The control panel is missing knobs and LCD panels are shattered. The 3×5″ aluminum window frame was blown out and laying on the ground in the loading area of the lift. Whatever happened here was big.

The lift was shut down until they could repair it. I went to visit Nino at a nearby hospital. He tells me it goes down like this:

He was looking for food so He went to he lodge and found a can of chili beans by the kitchen loading dock. Nino couldn’t get in to cook them so he decides to go to the lift shack and see if they had a microwave in there (which many did). His clothes were wet so He turned on the heater and hung his clothes up to get dry while He ate. There wasn’t a microwave in there but finds an old space heater. This was a 1970s exposed element (like a toaster) heater. I had used it myself hundreds of times in the past and it kicked ass. Well Nino turns the heater onto its back and places the 3 GALLON can of chili beans on it, apparently unopened. Nino plops his naked ass into one of the chairs as his beans cook and his clothes dry.

Nino falls asleep.

Chili beans everywhere. He can’t hear, his eyes are swollen shut and he has a piece of metal in his head. He then tells me he didn’t know where he was or how he got there. He said he couldn’t even remember who he was. Nino must have been out for a minute because it took me a couple to get to him and he was still in Narnia when I approached him that night.

I didn’t really have to fire him. I don’t think I legally could under the circumstances anyways. Nino never came back. He left all his shit in his employee shack and didn’t even come to pick up his last check.

2. Haha, there’s no way out of this

She sent us a text that she was skipping her shift to do cocaine. She then sent us a text immediately afterward that the previous text was meant for someone else and she was resigning.

3. Plot twist, they’ve been dating ever since

When I was 17 I worked at Wendy’s and one night one of my coworkers had a really bad asthma attack in the back room… the manager insisted that no one call for an ambulance because the company would be liable, after about 10 minutes of this girl gasping for breath on the floor, I picked her up and took her to the ER where they gave her a shot of something to fix it… When I got back to work they fired me for leaving during my shift… I didn’t even fight it. That was the worst job I’ve ever had.

4. Staples needs a “That was awkward” button

When I managed a porno theater/adult toy store, I had to sit down with an employee and go over surveillance footage of him stealing a “pocket pussy” and using it to masturbate in my stock room. I then handed him his final check, minus the cost of the damaged product. The most awkward and entertaining termination I ever had to conduct.

5. Come again?

Sister had to fire my aunt. She got her a job at a call center for a cable provider. Aunt decided she didn’t want to work for a few days, called in and said her husband died. Sister found out when co workers were pooling money to send flowers…It did not end well. Uncle never knew he died!

6. It came close to the golden ratio

A teacher at my school was fired for telling her class about her vagina and how beautiful it was… She taught mathematics.

7. Pranking reaches shit-storm level

He took pictures of another co-worker pooping and posted it on facebook. The pooper wanted to press charges for sexual harassment. These were guys in their 30s.

8. Why would YOU get fired for that

I was fired from a dog kennel for unknowingly playing with a wolf.

She thought I knew it was a wolf and I was being a reckless teenager.

9. He turned out to be a goddamn asshole

We had a kid that worked at the deli in the supermarket from my home town who was fired after he ate all the skin off of every rotisserie chicken they had.

10. Like the cereal?

Wasn’t me, but a guy in my class got fired from one of our local stores when he was caught jacking off with an apple that had a hole in it. We called him applejacks for the rest of the year.

11. You guys gave me a great parking space, and I can’t afford to lose it

I witnessed an amazing termination. I work for a staffing agency with two different divisions – one industrial temporary and one more managerial level.

I was in the middle of interviewing a guy who had just walked in claiming to have been laid off from a company the industrial temporary side works with.

During the interview one of my coworkers from the temporary side walked through and screamed “Damnit Ray! We fired you this morning! Get out of the building!”

Apparently the day before the guy pulled a knife on his boss, and his boss defended himself with a piece of lead pipe. They kept fighting and ran into the parking lot going at each other until quite a crowd formed. No one was seriously hurt, but you can’t just try to knife people in the parking lot.

When I asked him why he pulled a knife he said it was because his new boss was “acting like he was better than me when I’m twice his age.”

12. He asked the question that’s been bothering him since 1992

Not my story, but when my dad was in charge of HR for this company, he had to fire an employee for asking another employee if she shaved her pussy. Apparently, the female employee was sitting in the break room when the man just sauntered in there, sat next to her for a minute or so, and then popped the question. When their supervisor came to report it to him, my dad almost fell out of his chair laughing.

13. I mean, you can, only if no one knows about it

I was a manager at a Jimmy Johns some years ago.

At this Jimmy Johns we had a mentally handicapped 17-year-old kid who we basically paid to just clean the tables. Nice enough kid but he had one slight problem….he would sneak away during the shift and masturbate in the bathroom.

One night we had some friends of co-workers in to eat and one of them walked in oo this kid in action. I know what you are thinking….he was probably bent over the sink, trying to get a quick tug out before anyone noticed his absence. No….he was sitting bare assed on the floor, going to town on himself like nobody’s business with his pants and underwear pulled down and only around one leg. So he freaks out runs up and tells me…..and we all actually have a nice laugh about it. I was probably 20 or 21 at the time and found this quite hilarious.

After we had a good laugh about it, I told him we were lucky it was someone our co-workers knew, because he could potentially be in a lot of trouble. He said he understood and promised never to do it again.
Fast-forward to a week later. It’s the lunch shift on a Sunday. We are slammed with deliveries and in-shop customers when I hear a very irate woman yelling “I need a manager”. She explains to me how her 15 year old son just walked into the bathroom and saw one of our employees naked and masturbating.

As if there is any question who it is, I start apologizing profusely. Once the kid got dressed and came out of the bathroom she saw that he was handicapped she lightened up quite a bit. I really don’t even remember all the things she was yelling at me but, as you can imagine she was pretty hot.

I gave her $115 dollars worth of gift certificates as well as the home number to the franchise owner since the kid got hired because his parents went to church with the owner. After I got the lady and her kid dealt with I called the kids Mom and told him he can’t work there anymore. She was furious and just told me the locks on the doors must be confusing to him and to teach him how to use them. So i said, “Why don’t you just teach him how to not jack off in public?”

I mean lets face it. If I can’t jack-off on the clock…why should he?

14. How does this happen

I worked at a sonic in high school. I was promoted to night manager. First thing my boss had me do was call my grandparents to fire them.

“Grandpa, I have to fire you and grandma.”

His reply, “I love you and I understand why this is happening. Tell your cocksucker of a boss that I’ll be in to work tomorrow and he can fire me himself.”

First time I ever heard him cuss.

15. “Ungodly amount of porn”

An ungodly amount of porn. Like enough porn to make a sex addict blush. His computer crashed, so he took it to our IT people and the hidden porn mountain was discovered. And it turned out that he was watching it at work, which I still have no idea how it was possible since we have “open” cubicles where you can easily see everyone’s workstation. It’s a shame because he was good at his job and a super nice guy to boot. On top of it all, his wife left him shortly thereafter. At least he had the porn, I guess.

This happened at a very, very large corporation on a company-issued computer and hard drive. Every time you boot up your PC a splash screen pops up with all of the shit you can’t do on it, and it says explicitly that you cannot look at porn/sexually explicit material or you face immediate termination. It’s also an at-will employer, so cause isn’t necessarily even needed. Ethical and potential legal issues aside (What if Sasha Grey getting sodomized with a parking cone-sized rubber dick popped up during a client presentation?), everybody knows that you just can’t pull that shit on a company computer.

And even though I had to sign off on the paperwork to fire him, it was HR that drove the whole process since they own enforcing the policy. Even if I wanted to retain him, there was no fucking way it was going to happen. And the whole process from my end from the point when I found out what happened until security escorted him out was about an hour. Maybe the strangest hour of my life.

16. No one knew until he was arrested

I wasn’t a boss at the time but I had a co-worker that decided to leave work on the clock to pick up his friend. About an hour goes by and the store gets a call; it was my co-worker, he had to explain to management that he was in the back of a cop car for drag-racing. The funny part is management had no idea he had left.

17. Why do people suck

Where to start:

1. Guy claiming our Mexican store manager planted a fake $20 in his drawer because he wanted to give his job to another Mexican.
2. Left my energy drink out in my office and came back to it spiked with cheap vodka (It tasted DRASTICALLY different and sharp when I came back). Only other guy in the store stunk like that same cheap vodka.
3. Girl never showed up to open the store because she was on an impromptu road trip with her new “man”.
4. Guy was skimming ATM cash backs (selecting cash back on debit and pocketing it, people in that area were rich as fuck they never noticed.) eventually he did it to two mall employees and refused to give them receipts and got canned. He got caught with over $20. He said on his way out the door that he had made $6k.
5. Standard lied on his application about a felony. When his Gf didn’t lie for him (he gave her number as his parole officer when he got called out) he beat her bloody and brought her in to show me “what I caused” to happen when he came for his final check.
6. Bad BO. We got cited by the health department because Customers reported “rotting food”. He was homeless apparently but he had a shower in his hotel room and I’d given him money for deodorant. I tried.
7. Another guy I caught lying about his felony, when we fired him he tried to run me over in the parking lot.

That’s all I can remember offhand.

18. What the fuck

I’m gonna sound like whiny twat, but he farted on me and called me a “tar baby”.

19. He was lonely

I work at a restaurant. Well. We recently had a new dishwasher start working that everyone thought was a little bit… off. He’d say strange things, and blink a lot when he spoke. Not like regular blinking- very forceful blinking. Almost like he scrunched his face up every time. Anyways, that’s just a detail, it’s actually not relevant… So he ends up staying later at work than anyone else, you know, doing clean up and the like.

Our establishment, like most places, has an accountant. Well one night she was trying to remotely access the computers at the office at work, minding her own business, doing maths and all that, when someone starts closing her tabs. She keeps trying to reopen them, only to have them closed down again.

Then the porn starts popping up. Not just one site- this guy is accessing a buttload of porn sites at the computer at work, thinking no one can see what he’s doing (which, to be fair, you wouldn’t normally think about). Anyways, she calls the boss, who then calls the restaurant- of course the guy doesn’t pick up, he’s busy choking his chicken. Boss keeps calling, eventually the dude answers the phone.
Does he politely answer and say that we are closed? No, of course not. He yells “FUCK OFF” and slams the phone back down. So he can resume his so rudely interrupted business, no doubt.

Anyways, the last we heard was that his keys were promptly taken from him the next day he showed up for work (why he showed up again is beyond anyone’s guess) and we now remember him as Jerk-Off Jeff. True story.

20. If they catch you, there’s no denying it

Fired a girl for hiding in a walking cooler and eating candy right out of the box with bare hands.(managed a DQ) I walked in, caught her with her hands literally in the cookie jar…and she still tried to deny it. Ahhh…gotta love fast food.

21. This proves my point that Guitar Center employees are a bit on the kooky side

My wife had to fire a Guitar Center employee, because he came to work late. His excuse? He was wired all night from smoking catnip. He wanted to feel what cats feel.

22. He got too scared

He didn’t exactly get fired, more like not hired. We pick up people from the Goodwill Helping Hands program – a program that finds work for those who otherwise have a hard time getting work. They are paid by Goodwill for I believe two months and then the place they’re at decides if they want to hire them on or not.

This has led to a series of hilarious trials, but one guy. He was a older guy, probably around 50. This guy didn’t live too far so he walked to work every day. One day, as he tells it, a car scared him by driving by fast and too close to where he was walking. He shit his pants. Instead of going home and changing, or coming into work and using our shower and spare clothes, he took his shitty underwear off and brought them into the kitchen to another employee. He then handed them to said employee and said “Will you wash this for me, if you don’t mind?”

He had a lot of other issues going on that ended with him not being hired, but this is my favorite on that list.

23. Riiiiiiight

We had a guy at one of the bases I went to get medically discharged (psych problems) for bouncing an imaginary basketball all the time. And I mean all. The. Time. Sitting in the break room? Dribbling it. Walking to his vehicle? Bouncing it with him. On the computer? Yup. They even had someone “spy” on him when he was home alone. Sure enough, he was dribbling that imaginary ball. So long story short, he ended up getting medically retired. On his last day, he shot the ball into the trash can and said, “guess I don’t need that anymore.” Dude was faking the whole time, for almost two years, just to get med boarded and get out.

24. Does it even feel like the real thing? What the hell is wrong with people

As a restaurant manager, caught a dishwasher making sweet love to a raw chicken breast in the bathroom. It was so awkward that I wish I hadn’t even caught him.

25. The shame

A male employee was caught masturbating in the ladies restroom. He also admitted to taking a shit that looked like melted chocolate ice cream in the fitting room.

26. WAS THERE NOT A TRASH BIN

A girl at a gas station got fired for stealing a sausage biscuit. She went to the bathroom to eat it, and tried flushing the evidence. Ended up stopping the toilet up with the biscuit and plastic wrapper. Manager comes in to find the employee freaking out with an overflowing toilet with biscuit pieces all over the floor.

27. Guns, guns, guns

Didn’t happen to me, but this guy that managed a Walgreens a town over got fired for stopping a robbery. He was in the back of the store doing inventory and someone came in and tried robbing the counter, held the cashier at gunpoint. He came out, got the robbers attention off the cashier and pulled his concealed pistol out, told the guy to drop his gun and get on the ground. The robber took a shot at him, missed, and the manager returned fire and hit the guy. The guy survived and went to jail for strong armed robbery. The manager was fired shooting back at the guy. He has a concealed pistol license and Walgreens let him carry it, but the store policy is to give the robbers the money and get them out of the store then call the police. I think the guy deserves a fucking medal, not getting fired.

28. Oh my GOD, she was fucking upper-decking

We once had to fire a woman who liked to poop inside the cardboard toilet tissue tube and then stash the result in the cistern. Took us a while and a lot of plumber bills to figure out who was doing it.

29. Why the hell would you do that

I was working at the McDonalds at the time and there was this guy I called Asian Frank. Well I called him Frank cause no one could pronounce his real name. He was this overly relaxed type of guy. The following happened.

Frank was working on the Drive-in section. He had to fill the bags. Frank got hungry so he decided to eat a chicken-nugget. Now instead of doing this is in a quick and stealthy way, Frank decided to open an already packed chicken-nugget box and take a nugget out. He did this right in front of the window. So the customer could clearly see Frank was eating his stuff. The manager also noticed so I heard this scream from the back going.

“The hell do you think you are doing?!” Frank’s reaction was priceless. He had a nugget halfway up his mouth. He just stared at the manager. Not angry, not defiant, just this normal deadlock stare. And he bit down. Eating half of the nugget. Still staring at the manager he proceeds to chew agonizingly slow, while putting the other half of the nugget BACK INTO THE BOX and closes it.

He then, still staring at the manager, puts the fucking box into the customers bag. And that was Frank’s career at the McDonalds.

30. Real smart guy

At my pizza place, I had to fire a guy because he called in sick and then ordered pizza for a party using his employee discount. Idiot.

31. Isn’t this attempted murder

Nurse here, first job was in a nursing home. One resident told me there was a devil in the window and it kept scaring her. I thought dementia. Walked in the room just as a person in a devil mask slammed themselves against the window. I ran outside and tackled them and pulled off the mask a la Scooby Doo. It was one of the CNAs. He thought that giving her a heart attack would be fair retribution for her being a little cranky when he took vital signs. Fired him on the spot even though I didn’t have the authority to do so. It stuck.

32. Education trumps employment?

I got fired when I was 15 for going to a maths exam.

I got a call just before the exam started.

“Jolly, you’re supposed to be at work. Where are you?”

“… I’m at school. I have an exam. I’m 15, I told you this.”

“No, you’re meant to be at work. Who am I going to get in now?”

“I don’t give a fuck.”

“Right, you’re fired.”

“Okay.”

Now as a manager, I didn’t really get to fire anybody over anything weird. But I did fire one girl because she was smoking meth in the work toilets. Silly girl has a kid now. But at least she’s off the pipe.

33. She couldn’t handle the embarrASSment

I accidentally walked in on my boss taking a dump and she fired me a couple weeks later. She never locked the door.

34. She made a huge mistake

So, a long time ago in a corporate office far, far away was where this termination happened. I was employed at Hollywood Video’s corporate office as a “Guest Relations” member. I took calls (complaints, disputes, etc.) for every store nationwide. And it just so happened that this particular night was my second night after getting my promotion to the guest relations team.

I got a VERY angry call from a college aged woman (Boston area possibly? Can’t remember.) who had just been at the store. She was so mad she could barely talk to me. I managed to calm her down enough so that she could explain what happened. It turns out that this woman went into the store with her friends, and when they got to the counter, the female clerk engaged in small talk with her. Among the little dialogue choices she made, she blurted this little gem out: “You know, you hide your titties well.” The woman and her friends were stunned and left the store incredibly pissed. In an effort to patch things over, the female clerk ran outside and yelled out “It’s ok! I’m a lesbian too!”

I was speechless for a good few seconds while I took notes and then told her I would be letting the district manager know about this within 20 minutes (we had their emergency contacts for crazy shit like this) but asked if she minded if I called the store just to get their side. She didn’t protest. I’m thinking it HAS to be some kind of crazy misunderstanding. I call the store up, the female clerk answers and the conversation went like this:

Her: Hollywood Video, this is FemaleClerk.

Me: Yeah, this is WraithPDX over at corporate. Look, I just got a phone call…

Her: Oh, I KNEW you would be calling. She’s blowing this all out of proportion!

Me: …Ok, why don’t you tell me what happened.

Her: Well, I’m a lesbian, and I thought it was really impressive how she was able to hide her breasts so well, so I complimented her on it. i was just giving her a compliment and she freaked out! She should be glad I’m saying it’s such a good thing!

Me: …You actually said this to her….?

Her: Yes! I was just trying to…

Me: And you said something to her as she was leaving?

Her: Yeah! I told her not to be offended since I was also a lesbian, and she seemed like she was one…

Me: Ok, why the hell would you say that to a random customer? What in the world were you thinking?

She made feeble attempts to try and excuse herself from it, but my supervisor was listening in and told me not to argue anymore, hang up, tell the customer the DM will be getting in touch with her in 20 minutes, and leave it at that. I call the DM up on his emergency cell phone (This was 10pm PST) and told him what happened. I still remember the dead silence before he finally said “…are you fucking kidding me? I just hired that girl. For fucks sake…tell the customer I’ll call her in 5 minutes. That bitch is fired for sure.”

While I didn’t fire her, I was a witness to most of the scenario, and it was certainly one of the dumbest thing I ever heard an employee say to a customer.

35. 23 and still a damn child

I used to manage a liquor store. The weirdest firing I ever had to do was also the fastest.

We hired a rather rotund young man to be an evening clerk. Being a portly fellow myself, I saw no reason he couldn’t manage the stocking and other physical parts of the job as well as I did. Evidently he didn’t share that opinion.

I knew there was going to be trouble when he started off his first day by trying to tell me what to do. And I mean within the first few minutes of his shift. When I asked him why he thought he was in charge, he explained that since he was older than me, I should do what he says. I was 22 at the time. He was 23.

After explaining to him that, actually, the person with three years of experience and the position of manager does get to tell the new hire how to do his job, I proceeded to list out his duties, then asked him to restock our coolers. These were about nine doors wide, with a walk-in refrigerated area behind.

Thirty minutes into what should have been a ten minute job, I went to see how he was doing. I discovered that not only had he not stocked any beer, he had rearranged the cases into a makeshift chair, complete with a back and arms, and was just sitting in the 33 degree cooler like he was the Cold Miser in a Christmas special. When I asked WTF he was doing, he explained that he needed to rest because he was tired from moving all the beer cases. The ones he had rearranged to make a beer throne.

I called the owner, explained I thought I’d be better off finishing the shift on my own, and gave the Lord of the Cooler his walking papers. To this day, he’s still the most WTF employee I’ve ever had, or seen.

36. He was fired because he was a bad planner too

One of our mid-level field consultants (father of 2, well educated and decent guy) got a pretty poor customer survey sent in from the CEO of one of our large financial clients. This CEO also brings his 2 white labs to the office just about every day.

Fast forward a few days later, CEO calls us up saying he needs us to come in and review security camera footage. Apparently, when the aforementioned field consultant was tasked to go back and fix what he didn’t fix the first time, he thought it would be great revenge to shit on the CEO’s office floor and blame it on the dogs. Problem was, the CEO’s dogs were being groomed that morning.

We had to let him go. He had no regrets.

37. That was pretty impressive, and also goes to show you that you can fake it in life and get by

I’m an art director and had to hire an assistant. She had an impressive portfolio, a decent (but not overly incredible) résumé, and when I called her references, they sang her praises. HR seemed to think that was enough and approved her for the position.

About a month later, I was smoking a cigarette with a guy from IT and he said how funny it was that my assistant constantly Googled “How to [insert action here] in Adobe Illustrator”. I thought it was funny too, so I went to her desk, told her to save the page as a PDF, and she just froze and started trembling. Excuses, excuses, excuses, I walked away. Sure enough, I got a PDF five minutes later.

I found her portfolio and did a reverse image search. Every last image was stolen. I called back one of the references and the number was “not in service”. I contacted HR, they did a background check, and it turns out she had just gotten out of prison for felony identity theft. She also had two gross misdemeanors for theft. She had never been a graphic designer and never even went to college.

Read more hilarious true stories here.