53 People Share The Fastest They’ve Ever Watched A Coworker Get Themselves Fired

Had a guy last a couple weeks. A lot more than most of these stories but the reason was crazy. We thought he was a bit odd when he brought in 2 dozen donuts to celebrate his daughter’s birthday. Weird in retrospect but we didn’t care because it was free donuts. He even wrote “happy birthday” and his daughter’s name on the box.

We had 2 offices with 1 being in another state. We didn’t work very closely with the other team but they were part of our group and were on an introductory call with him. He had no reason to work with them. He pretended to be from a local fire department from that state and called one of the ladies in the other office (again, in another state) to tell her that her house was on fire. She recognized his voice and he hadn’t bothered to dial anonymously. But she was hysterical at first before common sense kicked in. He was escorted out shortly after she called the General Counsel. Yes, this was a legal department.

Had an HR manager last about a week because they hired him before the background check came back. He had a conviction for identity theft.

Different job they hired a metallurgist who made it about 2 weeks before someone found her Facebook page where she posted how she put a curse on the plant. It made management uneasy so they fired her. About 3 years later the place did close down but I think it was due to the incompetency of the managers.

My work hired a woman to answer calls at our call center. She said she knew how to use a computer. Her first day they had a trainer sitting with her when she revealed she had no clue how to use a computer. Like at all. Barely understood how the mouse functioned and she was pretty old. The trainer just basically said "I cant teach her how to use a computer" and they let her go. After that we had a basic technical test for all new hires.

We hired a girl with previous experience doing the thing we needed her to do. She seems like a great candidate, smart, friendly, interviewed well.

Her first day, she gets - I am very serious - 30 calls from home.

End of the day, we have a talk with her and she assures us that the calls will stop.

The next day she's got 10 calls before lunch. The CEO says to patch in the next call for her to him.

t was her freak-show boyfriend.

CEO tells him the calls have to stop if new girl's going to keep her job, things get ugly.

15 minutes later boyfriend shows up with a gun at our building screaming for CEO. Boyfriend didn't know CEO was an ex marine and packed heat in his desk. He'd been waiting for his moment.

Thankfully the cops get there before our CEO decides to handle this guy himself. (Turns out the cops respond quickly when you're working in a rich neighborhood and say a dude with a gun is at your doors)

Girl was fired same day.

Me working at Amazon, though technically I quit by auto-termination. I lasted 3 days.

It was 11 hour straight shifts standing in one place packing boxes. I was extremely sedentary back then and my feet felt like they were slammed into wheat thresher.

I couldn't even get past the physical pain to get to the soul crushing mental part of it. No idea how someone could ever do something so mind-numbing unless they quite literally had no other choice, which I do realize is often the case.

I worked as a forklift operator for a while during covid. We had been trying to find drivers for the holiday season and got one in for training. On his very first day everything seemed to be going well, he showed aptitude, he was good and smooth with the controls. It seemed like he would be a good fit.... up until he crashed into an overhead belt taking half the belt system out forcing us to shut down two lines for a week while they repaired it. 

He never came back after that first day.

New technician going to a service call. It was snowy, she spun out and hit a light pole. It happens. The big problem was that she was miles from where she was supposed to be and traveling in the wrong direction.

I was a corporate trainer for a project rollout for a bit before moving on to other projects.

I had a guy fall asleep in the morning session. Didn't bust his chops immediately, figured I'd just try and liven things up for the afternoon class.

He was asleep again within 10 minutes.

Got him out of there quickly.

I showed the new girl what to do at a grocery store. She was stealing stuff and didnt even make it to the end of her 1st shift.

I saw a federal employee get fired while still in processing. They filed the equivalent of an expense account receipt that was clearly fraudulent. They were still in the hotel and he just claimed to have spent the maximum allowable amount on each person for each meal. They had one conversation and he was booking a flight out. He's been there several days, but hadn't actually started what you'd normally consider work.

Our team was still fairly new to the organisation, experienced Power BI people but team itself was only couple of years old. This organisation is a GOC (Government owned corporation). Essentially runs like a private company but doesn't have the full profit 'race to the bottom' culture. Was a pretty good mix of private company culture mixed with government employee culture. Sometimes you did get the worst of both, but mostly good.

We had to interview for a Power BI position but HR did not allow us to ask technical questions because of HR imposed time constraints. The lady we interviewed said all the right things, used all the right words and had all the right things on her CV.

Day 1 i'm taking her through Power BI and its very clear she knows next to nothing. So I pivot into SQL, hoping that its just a "knows the stuff, can learn the tool" problem. Nope, doesn't know SQL. SQL was something she explicitly talked about in the interview as being good at.

Day 3 i'm on the phone to my boss, telling him this isn't going to work. She knows nothing. I've tried every adjacent skill and there is nothing she is capable of doing. His response "No way. I was in that interview. I'll spend tomorrow with her".

Day 4 Boss spends the day with her and confirms that yep, this girl is useless. Contacts HR to start termination. Australia has special rules that lets you terminate people in the first week differently than the first 3 months. HR's response was "Oh.. wow... how'd you work that out so fast... We don't have a procedure for that.... umm maybe you're stuck with her until the end of the probation period?"

Boss gets a very clever idea. We had a job for HR yet to be started. New girl is given that task. She walks down to the head of HR to ask questions about the project. He says "I don't have time, i'm on the phone". She then stands there and waits, in front of him, for his call to end.

Guess who was gone shortly after?

I was working a job in who knows where Alaska. Apparently they brought this poor guy up because they said he was good but when he finally got up there for the job, apparently there was something wrong with the background check and it kept going back and forth for about a week so we were trying to train him but we weren't sure how much we should train him but he eventually he was let go which was really bad for him coming all that way. Fortunately the company did pay for him to get back home.

I worked as a telemarketer to help pay my way through college. We would try to guess who wouldn’t come back after lunch their first day on the phones. People are mean to telemarketers and you had to give 3 attempts (hear no 3 times) or were reprimanded. I bet it was 25% the first day and 50% the first month. But it paid well for a college job and had lots of cool perks like bonus for meeting quotas and free meals when the team did well.