Thinking back over my career, there were quite a few employees who did dumb things, usually it was stealing and they were eventually caught and fired. But I think the dumbest thing I ever saw someone do didn’t actually get them fired, just demoted from a pharmacy manager position. Our RX manager thought it would be funny to leave a note for the other pharmacist where he somehow managed to make offensive comments about multiple people–insulting the pharmacist about being Asian, joking about a girl who was pregnant, and even making a joke about a Jewish person having a big nose. Needless to say, no one thought it was funny. He was offered a demotion or to resign and elected to take the demotion and later attempted to sue the company saying he was “framed.” That didn’t pan out so well for him either.
These are from users on reddit.
We’ve all had our bad days on the job. the days where we don’t work so hard, we’re overtired, or even just plain dumb. When we have these kinds of days, our biggest hope is that no one notices.
Well, here are 20 times someone’s boss DID notice, and the results are hilarious.
Many thanks to Reddit user MoggleMan for posing the question.
1/20. Slipping a $20 bill from the register into her bra and then vehemently denying it, calling me a racist after I confronted her.
I was 3 feet away from her and looking at her when she did it and she was on camera.
2/20. I’ve caught staff microwaving metal before, smoking blunts in the office surrounded by food stock and my personal favourite ‘accidentally’ smoking crack before work.
3/20. We have an employee that types “google” on the bing search bar of his browser, then hits the first result (google.com) and proceeds to google “gmail”, every time he wants to check his e-mail.
4/20. There is a woman where I work that opens a PDF, prints it, scans it, then forwards it to a coworker.
5/20. I saw somebody trying to put their leftover lunch (pasta) through the paper shredder instead of simply throwing it away.
6/20. We hired a receptionist who, two weeks after starting work, decided to print off about 150 (colour) Christmas cards, using company paper and ink, and the expensive new printer.
She honestly didn’t seem to think she was doing anything wrong and threatened to sue when she was fired because “it’s illegal to fire people at Christmastime.” She was laughed at and never heard from again.
7/20. I walked into work one morning to find a guy passed out drunk with an empty 30 pack & half-full bottle of Jack next to him. All lights on & dangerous equipment running.
He was supposed to stay an hour late the previous day finish a project & had decided to leave the building unsecured (he didn’t have a key or passcode) to go get liquor & beer, come back & drink til he passed out. Surely all of that took longer than the hour it would have taken for him to finish the job & go home.
Bonus: He was fired on the spot & then tried to sue the company.
8/20. I work with a woman who will use a calculator to come up with the figures she needs. She will then take all those numbers and manually input them into an Excel document rather than just doing everything in Excel.
9/20. We had to turn over source code as part of an audit for a large company (top 10 in the fortune 500). Part of the code had some logs with the word AnalThunder in it a lot. An employee named a VM AnalThunder and I got pulled into a meeting to explain why it was all over the “source code” (the logs).
10/20. “The weirdest thing is happening here. I’ve been watching that clock for the last hour, and it hasn’t moved.”
I explained to the employee that the battery had died. He was not in a time warp.
11/20. Worked with a guy that would find places at work to have a nap during work hours. HR dragged him in and gave him a warning. Two hours later he was found asleep at his desk. Was his last day…
Turned out be was working another job at nights.
12/20. I worked for a corporate office buildings security while in College. We got a new guy who accidentally took home a set of keys. We figured it out when we checked the inventory and saw he was the last one to have them, this is a common mistake even I had made. The next day me and one of my fellow supervisors called him into the office to ask him for the keys. We were just trying to keep him from getting into trouble since it was an act that could get you fired so we were doing it quietly. He insisted he didn’t have the keys. I asked him to check his pockets of his jacket. He did and his face went into shock. He pulled out the keys in utter amazement. I asked him, “If you turned them in, how did they end up in your jacket pocket?”
He thought for a second, looked me in the eye and said, “Someone here must not like me. Someone stole the keys and snuck into my house to put them in my jacket pocket while I was asleep.”
I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry. We let him go.
13/20. Employee walking around barefooted while helping customers in the lobby (not a big deal, we were a relatively easy going office). Employee has to run down to the basement for some equipment and comes back up to the lobby. Apparently he stepped on a staple in the basement and started bleeding on the white tile floor of the lobby while he walked around. Customers pointed it out to him and he says, oh, no problem. Employee grabs a tissue from lobby desk, spits on it and starts to clean up blood in front of customers… Yes, he cleaned up blood with spit in front of customers…
14/20. He was on camera, and could see himself ON CAMERA because the monitor was right there… he put on gloves and opened the safe to steal money. He was the AGM so he had the safe code, and I don’t know why he was concerned about fingerprints when he was literally being recorded.
15/20. I had an intern skip a day of work without calling in. I gave him a call and he told me he had a stomach flu. I explained that he’s welcome to take time off for sickness, but he has to call in or email and let me know. The next day, he skipped again and didn’t call, so I repeated the process. He did this a third time. When he came back to work, I asked to see him in my office. I let him tell me all about his stomach flu, then I opened a folder on my desk with Facebook images where his friends had come into town to visit and tagged him in photos of them doing shots in bars for the past three days.
I said “Is ‘stomach flu’ a type of shot? The funny part is that if you had just told me your buddies were coming to town and you wanted to go on a three-day bender, I would’ve given you the time off. The next time you decide to lie to an employer, set your Facebook to private. You’re fired, and you’re not getting any college credit for this. I don’t want to ruin your relationship with the college, so I’m going to give you an option. You can go back and just tell them that this opportunity didn’t work out. Or if you want to fight about the months you’ve just squandered here for no college credit whatsoever, I’ll forward these photos to your advisor. It’s your call.”
He thanked me for the life lesson, packed up his shit and left.
16/20. I worked at a hardware store with a guy who had a major pill addiction. He once fell asleep in the isle while stocking shelves. His pills were prescribed to him ( he just took too many), so we couldn’t fire him. Then, he took a mouse off of a sticky trap, poured gasoline on it, and lit it on fire. All of this was on film, since he decided to burn it on the loading dock. He got fired that day.
17/20. Driving a box truck, training a new hire. Tell him not to hit the gas so hard at green lights because he keeps having to pick up messes in the cargo area. So he pauses for a second, screams “GET SOME!” and floors it. Everything slams into the back door but I’m laughing so hard I can’t even get mad. They were magazines in separate totes for separate accounts which he had to sort by hand, so I think the lesson was learned at some point.
18/20. Bank manager here – I was looking on the cameras to see who kept leaving the vault door wide open. One of my employees was in the vault room alone and started practicing his golf swing for about two minutes with an extremely serious look on his face.
19/20. The one that sticks out is the kid that was like 18 and I had him raking the leaves outside of the office/shop. Watched him chase wild turkeys with said rake. Not a bright boy.
Another one, employee was supposed to take an order and install the furniture about 700 miles away. Said that the only way he would do it is if we let him take a semi truck. The job wasn’t that big and he was not licensed to drive a truck of that size. He even admitted that to the unemployment agency. Got fired and denied unemployment.
Lastly, one of the guys claimed that he was told he could drive the forklift on the lawn. He’s an engineer now actually.
20. I used to be the night shift manager at Target in the late ’90s. I caught a couple of our employees who were supposed to be scanning & stacking pallets in the warehouse playing Lazer Tag with their handheld scanners.
I had to fire their a**es the second time I caught them doing this.
Firing some lady in deli for eating a piece of chicken. Poor lady was probably hungry!