“How Dumb Can You Be?”: 45 Times People Got Fired And Had No One But Their Stupid Selves To Blame

Working at a call centre. We were in training. He took a call and thought the customer sounded hot so he took her number from her profile and started texting her. Naturally she found this highly creepy and reported him to our operations manager. He was fired that day and had to explain why to his wife.

Brand new cake decorator at my HEB turned in a cake with the words "I JUST REMEMBERED I HATE DECORATING CAKES".

I worked at a bank and one of the tellers called out saying she would be out for the week because she had appendicitis. It was bank policy that after 3 days of being out sick the bank manager would audit the tellers drawer which was locked in the vault, when the manager counted the cash in her drawer it was several thousand dollars short. She ultimately admitted to "borrowing" the money, she said that her boyfriend had some sort of monetary settlement coming in a few days and they wanted to take her kids on vacation with it so she "borrowed" the money, called in sick to work, and went to Florida. She claimed his check would come in while they were on vacation and she thought she could just come back to work after a week and return the cash without anyone knowing what had happened. She should have had charges pressed against her for bank robbery but for some reason they took pity on her and simply fired her on the premise that she pay the money back in full, I truly think management was simply covering their a**es because a teller should never be a position where they can walk out of a bank after their shift with several thousand dollars in their purse.

Somebody who worked for me. One of the top consulting companies did the usual graduate hire. One of mine was sent on a training course, then did not come back. We learnt he had asked his girlfriend to come stay with him at the hotel, decided nobody would miss him at the training, skipped the training, then they just stayed in the hotel room, thinking we would carry on paying for it. HR found out, Travel expenses, no show at training. I had the ‘pleasure’ of contacting him to tell him he was fired and we were withholding the hotel charges from his pay check. How completely stupid can you get, get a great job, just out of college and blow it up like that!

Stole cash from the register that had a camera pointed at it. She could see the view of the camera on a monitor right by the register, so she knew she was in frame.

I work for an airline and we fly for free, new-ish hire decides he'd rather be on the beach so he calls in sick and he shows up to the airport and hops on a plane, one of the sups sees him and lets him fly and they halted his flight benefits after the plane left. Don't know exactly what happened after that but I never saw him again.

Owners of the security company I worked for were both ex law enforcement. One was the chief of police he was fired for using city funds to fill his private vehicle. The other had some insane a**se of power charges. The one with the a**se charges is a major piece of actual s**t. He got their non profit human trafficking firm shut down because he “rescued” a woman from being s*x trafficked and offered her protection if she agreed to sleep with him instead. It came out that he was sleeping with 3 of the young female guards in their twenty’s when the 3 women settled for $10,000 each to not take it to court. He had a daughter older than me but had no shame hitting on me. Disgusting behavior and I’m still in the process of teaming up with multiple previous employees to get them shut down.

When I worked as the Cash Loss Control Officer for a bank, I was called to a branch to investigate a large cash difference. A new teller, who was only three weeks on the job, had a significant discrepancy at the end of her shift. Her supervisor had helped her with the reconciliation, and the branch reported that all checks had been made.

The next day, I went to the branch and asked to see the teller's reconciliation and microfilm copies. Within 30 minutes, I found two deposit slips for over $10,000 that were not properly processed. Both deposits were for the same customer. When I questioned the teller and her supervisor, the teller couldn't remember the transactions, but the supervisor became very nervous.

I contacted the customer, who told me the supervisor had personally made the deposits to repay a personal debt he owed. I confronted the supervisor, who confessed to the theft. He was immediately fired and arrested at the branch.

Had a guy get fired for bringing a drone to work and flying it on his lunch break, at a secure facility.

I mean how dumb can you be?

While serving in the army, a young private decided to take a Land Rover home for a long weekend. Realised he might get caught, so took it to a car park, smashed the ignition and set it on fire (all caught on CCTV)

However it took about a week for the unit to get informed by the police that they had found our burned out landy, no one had noticed it was missing and if he'd drove it back and left it where he found it, no one would've noticed it had gone anywhere.

Result - discharged and 6 months in civvy nick.

Not really dumb so much as memorable. Working at Sonic in the 90s. Training this new guy who seemed perfectly normal for a 18-20 year old dude. Weekend stoner, got along with the carhops without bein a creeper. Learned the grill and prep station pretty good in only a couple days.

His third or fourth day hes prepping onion rings and the owner of the local franchise had come in to do paperwork. Owner walks by the prep table and new guy turns and power slaps him across the face with a hand covered in batter and bread crumbs. Owner jumps back. Dude pulls one of his own legs up by the ankle with one hand, hops up and down on the other while playing air guitar with the batter hand screaming "I'm rockstar ghandi!" At the top of his lungs.

He guitar hopped all the way out the door screaming the whole time and then took off running and we never saw him again. He didn't even come back for his paycheck.

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!

He was a packager at a dispensary hub. He put a bunch of loose w**d in his pockets and tried to sell it to employees during first break, which is as long as he lasted.

#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.

Showed up to work high on m**h. For context I work in the kitchen and this is not all that unusual. What was unusual is when she became convinced that one of our takeout customers was the Antichrist and started screaming at him in tongues from the kitchen. Yeah there's not much you can do to come back from that.