“How Dumb Can You Be?”: 29 Times People Got Fired And Had No One But Their Stupid Selves To Blame

Our job was showing occupied apartments (people still lived there) for the landlord to re-rent. You had to be friendly and helpful, supervise, make sure people didn’t touch the tenant’s stuff, answer questions, lock up after.

This dude finished an apartment showing, stayed in the apartment, and started eating the tenant’s cereal out of the box with his bare hands! The tenant had cameras and sent us the video while he was still in there chowing down….

They got caught writing in tips - adding an extra one or whatnot. They got arrested at the restaurant.

Intern took a nap at work, but he chose to take that nap on one of the nice couches in the executive suite.

A guy I worked with got fired because he would use company stationery to write fake recommendation letters for his friends who were looking for a job. He gave himself a fake job title (we worked in word processing). I think he said he was Office Manager. He got caught when a prospective employer called asking for the Office Manager of the company instead of the name of guy writing the fake letter. When the real Office Manager got the call, his deception was revealed and he was out of there.

Guy got caught stealing office snacks on camera after HR literally sent an email saying “we have cameras, don’t steal the snacks.”

Coworker called in sick then posted Instagram stories from a pool party the same afternoon.

As a manager at GNC. I hired a girl who was a solid fit with the team. After 2-3 days, she no called / no showed. I found out later it was cuz her boyfriend “didn’t like her working with guys”…
Good luck!

#1: We got a call from a truck/lorry-driver and said that he saw one of our company cars swerving across the road. Turns out he was drunk out of his skull at 9am. He started working 2 weeks prior.

#2: Had a guy working at a tech company (camera's all over the place) steal a tablet/i-pad from a room. The tablet he stole was back at the company for repair, so the idiot got fired for stealing a broken item.

Worked in kitchen. A co-worker got caught attempting to steal a bag of napkins. He put a whole pile of them in a paper bag, then looked up at the security camera, then tried to subtly put the napkin bag under the counter.

Someone found the bag filled with napkins, so they checked the security cameras. And the guys behavior was so sketchy, it was obvious he was trying to steal them.

Managment decided that if he tried to steal these, he probably had already stolen other things, and they fired him - it was his first and only offense.

Right after he got fired, covid started. Last I heard, he spent all of covid unemployed, struggling to buy insulin for his girlfriend. I never imagined someone's life could be so wrecked by napkins.

I felt bad about the whole situation, but I had nothing to do with it. He was probably stealing the napkins because he couldn't afford toilet paper.

Back when the Internet was newish I worked for a company you have absolutely purchased fuel from... and we hired a guy to come and sort out some infrastructure issues and work out who was using all the bandwidth.

A month later we got a bill for like $27,000 for "bandwidth overrun".

Turns out that within an hour of being in the building he had set up a Napster node and was downloading every file in there, and re-sharing them.

When we fired him he had tears 😭 in his eyes and was genuinely destroyed... he just kept saying "But I read the Employee Handbook and there was nothing in there saying I couldn't do that!".