58 Times People Got Fired And Everyone Was Left Stunned

I worked in the OR with a guy that was just a little “off” at times. I was setting up a sterile field for a procedure, he walked behind me and ground his pelvis against my behind. I was sterile gloved so I didn’t hit him, but I turned to him and told him to get the hell away from me. This was done in front of other employees who knew me very well and knew I meant it.

His reply to me was to the effect of, you want it. The department supervisor was out day (Friday,) but I planned to speak with her personally on Monday. Unbeknownst to me, he continued the to make inappropriate actions and say inappropriate things to patients the rest of the day.

Monday morning I didn’t get to see the manager first thing, because I was assigned to an OR, but was planning on speaking to her as soon as I was free. Well, by the time I was free, he was GONE!

My co workers had already reported him to the supervisor, who took him directly to HR, who called security to be escorted out of the hospital. Apparently, they had a file started on him and this was just the icing on the cake.

What really shocked me was when an acquaintance from another department said, ““I can’t believe you got him fired.” Correction! He got him fired! It was all done before I had the opportunity to file my report.

Briefly worked at a small meat packing factory, only four other employees. The self appointed “supervisor” kept offering me meat off-cuts to take home for free. Lucky (see why soon), I checked that this was ok with the owner before accepting—it was.

I was able to take home enough meat (and cheese) each day to keep the family well fed. The youngest was very keen on cheese and was known as the cheese baby at the local supermarket, where the women used to give her “free" samples.

One day the owner called the “supervisor” up to the office, and soon after he was dismissed and walked out of the building.

It turned out he was trimming meat, packing it, and loading it into his car to sell on. The off-cuts he was giving me were from the stolen meat and given to me to conceal the theft.

Someone had told the boss, while he was out delivering, about “someone" selling cheap meat. So the boss had secretly installed hidden cameras both inside and on the outside of his building and saw what was going on.

If I hadn't checked with him about the meat I was taking home, I would have been implicated in the thefts.

Yes, and I got him fired. I was the night, Trauma charge nurse at the hospital where I worked. About midnight we were finishing up an emergency appendectomy.

The patient was a very attractive young lady who had had a chest augmentation. (this is important later in the story) As we were cleaning the betadine off of her abdomen, and placing the dressing. The young man who had assisted the surgeon reached up and groped her chest.
Aghast I asked him: What the hell do you think you are doing??
He replied: I wanted to see what they feel like.

I asked him: Do you realize you just committed a crime?

His answer: She is asleep she will never know.

My answer: Yes but we will.

After the patient was safely in recovery, the anesthetist and I wrote up the incident. Then called the head of HR at three AM. At six thirty the guy arrived back at work and was taken directly to the OR directors office where the head of HR, the Director, and myself were waiting. Security escorted him to his locker, then to the door. I asked about getting the police involved, but HR nixed that citing liability issues.

I had a co-worker who was moving up a bit. His ex just had their baby, he was a proud father, getting in as many hours as he could so the baby would have a roof and food. And then one day, he stopped coming in. There was speculation as to his leaving, but none of us knew for sure. We knew he wouldn't have just quit.

Then a couple weeks later, I see him at a furniture store. He tells me what happened, and told me I could tell the others as well. He had been waiting in the queue to pay for his food on his break. He was getting thirsty, and there were several people ahead of him. So he decided to take a sip of the drink he was about to purchase. Well, one of our other coworkers saw this and turned him in…FOR STEALING! He didn't steal; he was going to pay. But did he have proof he was going to actually pay? He got fired. It pissed all of us off, and we came to dislike the one who turned him in.

When you go to work at The Home Depot, one of the first things you are told is, “never follow a shoplifter out of the store. You will be fired immediately if you do.”

We had a rather scary-looking woman working our contractor sales desk - scary not because of her face, but because she looked like she could lift 500 pounds with one hand while she was punching you out with the other. However, she was really nice. We’ll call her Mary.

I come in from my two days off and my manager told me, “you’ll never believe why Mary got fired.” Obviously she didn’t beat anyone just for making her mad, because I WOULD have believed that. Nope, and this was a classic one: we were selling a cordless tool set that cost $500. We had them locked to the racking with cables and padlocks, just like Corporate told us to do. Two shoplifters figured out how to defeat the locks, and stole two of them along with some other stuff. Mary followed these geniuses out to their pickup, jumped in the bed while they were driving away at a high rate of speed and threw all the stolen merchandise out of it before jumping out herself.

I didn’t work closely with her, but I knew her and her husband outside of work because they were friends with my fiancé at the time (as a side note, she and her husband were older than us and in the “old enough to know better” category).

Almost 20 years ago, I worked for a staffing agency—actually in the staffing agency as the receptionist/switchboard operator/general clerical. She was someone we sent out on clerical temp jobs. She also had a side business with her husband as a vendor of collectors’ knives and swords, some personal defense devices (like pepper spray, legal versions of night sticks, etc.), and medieval-style costuming bits like cloaks, tunics, etc.

One Monday, I came into work and was a bit confused because there was a flurry of tense activity amongst the managers and staffing agents—talk of formal apologies and worry about legal action.

Turns out, the current temp job she was on had a company car that didn’t get used a lot. Welp, she and her husband decided it would be okay to borrow that car for the weekend. She had a lot of trust there and was allowed to work late and shut down the office for the night. They used it to help transport their merchandise to a convention where they were vending, then planned to get in early Monday morning and return the car.

Things didn’t go quite as planned because that weekend, the owner of the company returned from a business trip and had the airport taxi drop him off at the office so he could drive the company car home instead of paying for a taxi all the way to his house, since he lived way out in the “country.”

Only, the car wasn’t there. He quickly determined it had to be someone from within the company because the keys weren’t on their hook, but there were no signs of a break-in. It took hours for him to call other employees, deal with the police, and also find someone to come get him and take him home—not a good end to a long, tiring trip.

So Monday rolls around, and my acquaintance just rolls up to the office in the vehicle, thinking she got away with it, having no clue about the angry hornet’s nest she was about to walk into.

Needless to say, she was immediately fired, banned for life from our agency, and is super lucky no one pressed charges.

Years ago I was a single parent trying to get my college degree, and I worked several jobs to make ends meet. One job was at a popular chain restaurant waiting tables at lunch, nights, and weekends.

The restaurant had two of my co-workers who did the bookkeeping from the previous day’s transaction each morning. When one of the co-workers quit, I was asked if I wanted to take on the extra work. It was good money, and the early morning hours worked well around class and my son’s school schedule.

The bookkeeper still on the job really went out of her way to make sure I had the training I needed and checked in regularly to answer questions or make sure I could finish the work on time each day. I really appreciated all her support. All her co-workers loved her because she was always so helpful and nice to everyone. She also waited tables in the evening and acted as a back-up manager when needed. With all she did, she never got riled up about anything.

She was amazing because she could handle working many hours to support her child and put her husband through his final year of college.

A few months into the job, I found the books didn’t balance on occasion. My boss stated that it was not unusual with so many transactions happening each day, and we wrote it off. But it started happening more often, and being the analytical person I am, I kept digging in to find out why.

We eventually confirmed that someone was stealing, but it was not clear how. A girl that waited tables was always in money trouble, and it was pretty common knowledge. At work, she constantly received calls from collection agencies and grabbed any extra shifts she could get. She was a friend outside of work, so I knew the situation.

My boss was convinced she was the one stealing because she was so vocal about her desperate need for money to pay the bills. Since I knew her, I wanted to be absolutely sure she was the one and did extra work to identify the source of the balancing issues.

It was a total shock to everyone when it was finally learned that it was not her at all.

It turned out to be the nice, helpful, and amazing bookkeeping partner who never got riled. She confessed that she couldn’t pay her bills, and her husband in college was not working. She was using her authority as back-up manager to void tickets when customers paid cash and then pocketed the money. She helped others with voids and was able to spread those voids across many wait staff, making it difficult to track it.

When her co-workers started hearing through the grapevine what had happened, they really took it hard. People were so disappointed because of the trust they had in her. It was such an impact that my boss had to turn psychologist and meet with workers to help them get a handle on why this would happen.

This was a lesson for me and why it has stuck with me. An outgoing worker who made it known she was having money trouble was automatically assumed to be the one stealing. The person who seemed to have it all together was the one really in trouble and did not know how to ask for help.

A woman at our company was an executive assistant whom everyone liked and respected. She was professional, efficient, friendly, and physically attractive to boot. One day, there was an article cut out from the police blotter of the local PennySaver making its way around the company.

“Jane,” the assistant, had been arrested and charged with embezzling a huge amount of money from our company. It turned out that there was a system for entering expenses, where if someone at her level needed to purchase something, they were required to enter it somewhere in the computer before the purchase was made. She figured out that no one was checking these expenses. So she was creating fake purchases, such as office supplies, for large amounts of money and actually purchasing American Express Travelers checks instead.

She was having the checks delivered to her right at the company. Somehow, somebody finally figured out what she was doing, and she had actually quit just before they arrested her. The girl who wound up replacing her got a bunch of mail one day and opened an Express envelope addressed to “Jane,” and it was jammed with traveler's checks. She handed the checks over to the head of HR, who already knew why they were showing up in the mail. No one there ever saw that coming.

This has been 25 years ago. I was working for a nationally known shoe chain. I noticed that our till was coming up short whenever the manager worked, yet anytime I was by myself it would balance either to the penny or close to it. Absolutely nothing I could prove, and I really wasn't suspicious at first.

As time went on, however, he got quite paranoid. We were expecting upper management in and he was telling me how they were sitting in the parking lot of the gas station watching us, he just knew it. If they asked anything about him, tell them I knew nothing.

The next day loss prevention was in. After a ton of back and forth, the LP guy told me they had hidden cameras in the store and had him in tape stealing money and sleeping with employees in the backroom.

I had a co-worker, a UX designer, who was called “Ursula” around the office, because she both looked and acted like the villain from the Little Mermaid. She was generally rude and abrasive, and I don’t think there was a single person in the office who could tolerate her, much less like her. If she had eventually been let go due to conflict in the workplace, no one would have been surprised, and it probably would have been a lot better for her, too.

The company I worked for at the time had clients primarily in the Fortune 500 space: Lowes, Home Depot, Mariott, Delta, etc. All of these clients generally had their contractors (us) sign detailed Non-Disclosure Agreements, basically prohibiting us from sharing information about the work done in detail, leaking Intellectual Property, or in some cases even disclosing we worked for them for a set period of time after our contracts were terminated. These are taken very seriously in my industry, as Intellectual Property is the name of the game, after all.

There was one particular client at the time, though, who was FAR more strict. Any employee of the company not directly engaged on the project was not even told who the client was, what kind of work was being done, nothing. And one of the members of the team was Ursula.

About two months into the project, my team was sh**ting the breeze in our own area when someone decided to start looking people up on LinkedIn. Good way to pass the time, right? Well, we stumbled across Ursula’s profile and found that she has linked DETAILED information about the client and project in her profile. Screenshots of designs depicting unreleased new content, including the client’s logo, photographs of closed-door white-boarding sessions covering UX flows, a written description of the project goals and timelines.

We’d been laughing and joking with each other, but when we saw this, the whole room went dead quiet. I don’t think any of us had ever seen a NDA breach this bad before.

So we walked over to the office of the Head of Delivery, laptop in hand, and showed him what we found. He just said, “Okay, I’ll take care of this,” and ushered us out of his office.

Five minutes later, a secretary escorted Ursula into his office, and we heard muffled yelling for about an hour. When the door finally opened, she was escorted to the elevator and never seen again. Didn’t even stop by her desk to grab her things.

When I was 20 and a third-year university student, I worked part time at a large department store. There was another student there, also in third year. He and I hung out. One day, he was no longer there. I asked the department manager if he was coming today. Apparently, he got fired for stealing from the cash register. $2! What an idiot. Who steals $2! Who steals anything?!

A few days later, some guy walked up and wanted to buy something that cost $.40. Anyway, he put $.40 cents down and walked away. So I then entered it in the cash register, put the cash in the drawer and threw the receipt away. It turns out that he was a security guard and was testing me to see if I was stealing, too.

Yes, it was me!

I had worked at a doughnut shop. It was a small business with just two locations at the time. I had started as a night manager and within the year had moved into Operations Manager, while also working as a store manager for the smaller location. Because the smaller store wasn’t as busy during the week, I worked alone most days.

I ran the store while simultaneously running the operations part of the business as well. I averaged 55–60 hrs a week. That was fine with me. I loved my customers and I loved my work. And the overtime was great too.

On the weekends, I had two workers that helped during the day. The night shift had three or four people every night of the week because that is the shift that made the doughnuts and decorated them. I made the menu every week which changed nightly. We also often had special orders that sometimes were ordered weeks in advance.

The night manager had been there almost as long as I had but still could not seem to learn how to do the job without making almost daily mistakes. Since he didn’t know the job, the people he trained didn’t learn how to properly do things either. It started to become so bad that my shift went from an 8 hr shift to a 10 hr shift because I would have to fix their mistakes. We were bleeding money due to inventory and labor costs.

The owner came in a couple of times a week and we had a meeting every Monday. I expressed my concern to him. He wanted to take care of it. He was my boss so I couldn’t say no. He had a very “that’s good enough” mentality so he just kind of brushed it off.

During the last 8 months of my employment, I began to have stomach pains. I chalked it up to my gallbladder because it was intermittent at first. The pain became increasingly painful and I began to have a distended abdomen. I finally made a dr appointment and was sent for an emergency cat scan. They discovered a mass and scheduled me for a surgery two to three weeks later. There was no way to tell if it was cancer until I had it removed, but my tumor markers came back high so my surgeon was fairly certain it was.

I was obviously upset and still came to work every single day. I would often break down and cry in between my customers.

Because we were a small company, no paid medical leave or FMLA was available, but my boss and I had a meeting and I expressed concern about my 8 week recovery. I was worried who was going to take over my responsibilities because we had a hard time keeping employees. I also expressed concern about not having an income during that time.

My boss told me that I didn’t need to worry about that, that we were “family” and the company would take care of me, and all I needed to focus on was getting better. He and I had agreed that after my initial two week post-op appointment that I would resume the operations aspect of my job from home. Everything was agreed upon, and I went into surgery feeling that my job was something I didn’t need to worry about.

My surgery went smoothly. I had a complete hysterectomy plus a 10lb tumor removed. Thankfully, it was benign.

At two weeks, I told him my doctor released me to desk work. He told me he had no work for me at this time. I was taken aback because of our previous agreement. We had a small disagreement and he called me. I didn’t answer because I was crying. I sent him a text and told him that I would call him in the morning when I wasn’t upset.

I woke up the next morning and texted him that I was available to talk. He informed me that I was being let go. I was astounded. I asked why, and he said for being negative, referring to the night shift never completing their jobs.

I was so upset and felt betrayed.

Three days later, two of the night shift workers, including the manager, were arrested for trafficking m*th while at work. My negativity was founded. But he would not let me come back.

I filed for unemployment. My claim was in fact-finding for months. I finally received a letter that he was fighting my unemployment.

About 20 years ago I worked for Fred Meyers. I had a store director (highest position in the building, in charge of 100+ employees) get fired for stealing the change out of the store brand pop machine in the employee break room. I don't know how long he was stealing for, but I'd be surprised if he got even 100 bucks from the machine. At the time, the director was making a bit above 100k in base salary and potentially tens of thousands in bonuses depending on sales at the store. Easily the dumbest theft story I've known about.

What I am about to tell you is absolutely true. One morning, I went to work and during a short break was sitting with a co-worker in my department (we were site services guys), enjoying a quick cup of coffee. About ten minutes later, a third member of our team walked in and sat down, joining us for a few moments. We exchanged “Howdy” and commenced in some small talk before the third guy got up and went to his office.

Here is what we found out two weeks later…

That very morning I just described… a few hours earlier, this third member of our team had awakened at around 3am and gone to his mother-in-law’s home. He was having major financial issues, and was demanding help from her. She refused, having helped them in the past, but now deciding her help was over and they needed to deal with their financial problems on their own without her involvement.

This got him really agitated, to say the least. So much so, he picked up a lamp and struck her over the head. Well, as if that wasn’t enough, he then took a pillow off her bed, upon which she now lay bleeding and unconscious, and proceeded to smother her to d**th.

He then took her cell phone, wallet and some other things and left, and drove across town (about 20 miles or so) to work, where my co-worker and I were already. Along the way, he changed out of his bloodied clothing, put everything in a bag (the cell phone, wallet, his clothing), and found a dumpster in an apartment complex about two miles from work.

He then proceeded the rest of the way to work, just a few minutes late.

Yes as working as a detective in Germany, My boss lived upstairs from me, we each had a separate shed pretty big that went with our duplex. I thought he was well off by this job, Him and his wife wore very expensive clothing every day, and they had the best of everything. One day I was off and watched as many police as well as other law enforcement came and arrested him. At night, he was going into the military store and taking new cloths as well as everything else he could. When they opened his shed, there were cloths stacked from floor to ceiling. I believe they took out like 36 bicycles he had taken. Some suits were around 300 and more dollars. It was crazy. They took him to jail. I remember him being very mean to his kids and would recite quotes from the bible at them, just yelling the quotes. You could hear them crying. So I was happy to see him go.

An office admin with three small kids had check-writing privileges to pay bills, and created a fake company to pay bills to, but got greedy by writing a $30,000 check that got noticed. $52,000 was taken in total.

The company wanted the money back, and she was pretending like she didn’t know what happened when she was confronted. She was told to “pay the money back, or someone else will be raising your children while you’re in jail.” So she broke down and confessed. Asked why she did this, she said she was taking the kids to Disney, buying a big screen TV, and starting a side business “because I thought I deserved it.”

She was obviously fired immediately, and she signed a payback agreement drafted by an attorney with “go to jail” consequences if she did not pay it back. She did end up paying back all the money.

Yes. I remember working in a law firm many years ago. One of the ladies in the accounting department very openly “flaunted” her faith/Christianity. Her husband was in charge of another department — maintenance, I believe. I did not realize they were living pretty high on the hog. It was discovered that she was stealing from the company to the tune of six figures a year. Apparently the husband was buying things for their house, and saying it was being spent on supplies for the office. Never saw it coming, and it took a while for the situation to come to light. But that was quite eye-opening.

It wasn't “truly shocking" in the sense of being lurid tabloid fodder, it was shocking in the sense of being really, really stupid, and brought about by breathtaking arrogance.

Let me set the scene. This was a large company HQ, with a pretty decent and somewhat subsidised restaurant. A lot of it was self-service, and then once through the tills, there was a station with cutlery and condiments etc. It mainly worked on trust.

Enter Jared, a systems analyst who thought he was cleverer than anyone else. It turns out that he hadn't paid for a lunch in over a year — his own colleagues ratted him out.

He'd go and fill a tray, then walk past the tills and double back as though he'd forgotten something — basically he just walked around confidently with a tray and nobody really noticed (he'd go when it was busiest).

When his manager was told about this behavior, he was initially skeptical, but eventually a surveillance operation showed that it was true.

He was summarily dismissed for theft, without a reference, and told the police would be involved and the caterers would sue him in civil court if he didn't go quietly — and of course there was a week of solid video evidence.

So he blew off a £60K job with excellent benefits to save a fiver a day.

I worked with a very nice guy who was an excellent clinician in a hospital I worked at previously. He was also an excellent teacher and trained students and interns very well. Many others were horrible at having patience with students and interns, but he was great.

He trained me when I first started, and as a new graduate in the field I was still a little unsure of myself, but he helped me a lot—gave me confidence and helped me do well.

One day at a department meeting we were told by one of our managers that he no longer worked there. They refused to tell us why and just said he was told to leave. Many of us liked him and were shocked to hear this, since he was a good clinician and an overall really good person. I really felt bad for him, especially since he had helped me so much when I first started out.

He isn’t on social media or anything like that, so unfortunately I’m not sure where he is or what he’s up to now.

It later turned out that the manager who fired him was the one with the problem, as she was likely trying to get rid of the few men working in our department in an effort to bring in more women clinicians. I have no problem at all with trying to get good representation, but manipulating people and their livelihoods to achieve that goal is reprehensible.

Later, I was glad to hear she no longer worked there, probably because some of the corporate leadership saw what she had done to many people. I hope the guy who was such a great teacher to me is doing well now. People like him deserve to do well, and people who manipulate others like that manager did don’t deserve to succeed.

He was fired. It was shocking. But I personally saw it coming a mile away. So I'm cheating a bit.

Sean was a fellow delivery driver at a pizza restaurant. He was the epitome of the go-getting, happy-go-lucky type of guy who always saw the best in everyone around him. In our restaurant (and most fast food restaurants in the country) the staff is overwhelmingly women. As a male employed in a fast-paced female environment, us male delivery drivers knew that you had to be firm and assertive with the female coworkers otherwise they'd take advantage of you.

Sean didn't seem to get the cue. He would mop the floors, refill ice bins, sweep, go out and pickup lunch, lift heavy boxes of meat etc for any female who had the ability to remember his name. He loved to make people happy. Us drivers would warn him to stick with his job specs otherwise he'd be doing favours all day and not get any deliveries done. He paid us no heed.

One fateful day, the Assistant Manager held a meeting. She noticed for the past few weeks the meat stocks were going missing. Every week she did a quick audit of the remaining stocks and usually the figure would be off by a package or two. However her audit revealed entire cases of meat were vanishing with no possible explanation other than in-house theft.

After viewing the security cameras for a lengthy period she finally discovered the culprit. Sean was fired promptly. Everyone was shocked. Nobody expected Sean, with his heart of gold, to be a petty meat thief. Sean passionately declared his innocence. However the camera footage revealed that he kept entering the chiller where meat and other food ingredients were kept. Delivery drivers had no reason to go in the chiller unless it was busy and they were asked to help bring out stock.

The footage also revealed Sean exiting the chiller several times with a mysterious bag just before his shift ended. Sean passionately declared his innocence but management would hear nothing of it. He was fired and blacklisted from ever working at any of the branches again.

However meat still continued to go missing at an alarming rate. The assistant manager was at her wits end trying to solve the mystery. The head office warned that any further loss of meat stocks would be deducted from everyone's salary. These were the magic words that made everyone on the alert for the thief.

In a few days a breakthrough came when one of the workers confided to the manager that one of the newer workers (I'll refer to her as Janet) kept bringing lunch and putting it in the chiller. However Janet would never be seen eating the lunch that she brought. Instead she would always return the bag home. This was indeed suspicious.

Upon inspecting Janet's lunch bag they found a pack of ham. Janet was the culprit all along. She admitted to her crime and with the threat of criminal proceedings, management got her to confess that Sean was innocent.

She admitted that Sean had a crush on her and would give her a ride home when both of their shifts ended the same time. Before they left she would ask that he retrieve her 'lunch’ from the chiller for her. Sean never suspected a thing and innocently and unwittingly assisted in her theft.

Feeling guilty the assistant manager called Sean to ask if he wanted his job back. Sean declined the offer. He had gotten a much more lucrative position working for a cable company as a technician. Had he still been working at the restaurant he wouldn't have known that they were hiring.

Some things happen for the best. I was very happy for Sean. Unfortunately for us we were no longer allowed to keep our lunches in the chiller from the that moment on.