The Stupid Mistakes That Got People Fired

34. Literally Nothing

I’ve seen people let go for lots of reasons that were pretty dumb, ranging from doing cocaine off of a urinal in the men’s room to giving a female employee a surprise backrub while asking her if she’s attracted to men with power, but my personal “I’ve got to let you go” stupidest person ever is this guy:

He was an assistant editor at my company. I was his boss. On his first day on the job, I told him what I told all of my people on their first days, “Your job for the next week is to ask questions. If you have never performed the task requested of you at this company, I want you to ask a question. If you have only performed that task one or two times at this company, I want you to ask a question. If you have performed that task one hundred times before but are not 100% absolutely certain that you are doing it correctly, please ask a question. The only way to give me confidence in your work is to ask lots and lots and lots of questions. We do things in a very particular way here, and it does not always make perfect sense because the explanations are sometimes very complicated. I will try very hard to explain the why and how of everything we do, but I’ve been here too long and I forget some things that seem obvious to me now but really aren’t obvious at all when you come in new. So please, PLEASE ask questions. Constantly and without hesitation.”

After that speech, which I seriously gave to everyone on their first day, I gave the guy a simple task. Look at some footage and sort it into bins (basically folders) according to the content of the footage. Sunsets go in the sunset bin, plants go in the plant’s bin and animals into the animal’s bin. Very. Simple.

So an hour goes by. Then two hours. I check-in. “Hey man, how’s it going?” “Good.” “Any questions?” “No.” This concerns me. “Do you remember the speech I gave this morning? I really need you to ask questions.” “I don’t have any.” Ahh, the c*cksure arrogance of youth. So I sat in with him and watched him work for a while. I caught a few places where he wasn’t watching the full clip and missed some sorting options, but mostly he was okay. As I left, he said, “I have a question: When do I get to do important work?” Great. The first day on the job and he already thinks his job is b*llsh*t. “This is important. We’re making sure the editors can find the footage they need when they need it. You’re saving them hours and hours of time searching through these bins. Is it boring? Yes. Is it tedious? Yes. But it is important. By the way, when you’re done sorting, please come get me before you do anything else. I’d like to double-check the work before we send it on so that it comes out of your hands spotless.”

Four more hours roll by without a single question. I had my own work to do, so I didn’t really note the time until I suddenly realized “holy sh*t, it’s been half the day without any questions.”

So I checked in again and it went almost exactly as it went the first time I’d checked in. So I told him a fact: I know there are clips that aren’t obviously X category or Y category, and I’m surprised he wasn’t asking questions about those. He told me he got it and it was fine. So I reiterated, “Come get me when you’re all done and I’ll check, okay? I want to believe you, but I also am concerned that you haven’t asked a single question when, in fact, your only actual job for the next week is to ask questions.” He shrugged and off I went, sweating a little in fear of the mess I would find at the end of the day.

The end of the day rolls around, and he starts to leave. “Hey man, let’s check that work before you go,” I tell him as he walks past my desk putting his jacket on. “Oh, okay,” he replies. We head back to his desk and – there’s nothing there. Literally nothing.

“What happened to all of your work from today?”

“I finished it.”

“So where is it.”

“Well, I finished it.”

“What does that mean? Where did you put it when you finished it.”

“I deleted it.”

What. The.

Apparently captain no questions over here thought that the act of sorting fundamentally changed the properties of our footage such that you no longer needed the sorted bins. Furthermore, he also deleted not just his destination bins, and not just all of the destination bins my team had made prior to his being hired, but the primary source bins as well, meaning that all of that footage was gone. This was something like 25,000 clips of stock broll that was nearly 40 hours long and had taken over 800 total hours to view, label, prep, and sort. I honestly have no clue how he thought this could possibly have been right.

I did the math at the time and the total cost to the company was nearly $180,000 of lost work time.

“Did someone tell you to do this?”

“No.”

“Why didn’t ask me what to do when you finished?”

“I didn’t want you to think I was stupid.”

Hahahahahahaha. Ha. FML.

35. Bad Back

I was a supervisor in security at an amusement park. We would have employee parties 3 or 4 times a season where we’d close the park to the public and let the employees ride all the rides. Since we still needed to have security and ride operators we’d rotate the shifts but everyone had to work a little. This one girl who was already on thin ice called in the day of the party saying she’d hurt her back too badly to come into work. She said she could barely stand.

She’d managed to get through a security line with a new agent who had no idea she had called in and we caught her coming off of a rollercoaster. Yea… Bad back… I fired her on the spot and escorted her and her guest out of the party.

36. A Pretty Rough Day

I had an employee tell me his bag was stolen from his work area. I asked what was in it so I could file the report, “My weed and my money!” He was then shocked when we had security escort him out. So not only was his weed and money stolen but he was also fired. A pretty rough day for him.

billyb0b70

37. Yelp Review

I work in grocery retail.

He was very open with his opinions with the other team members about our Chinese customers not getting out of his way when he working on the floor.

He impressed one of our customers so much they wrote a scathing yelp review about him and our store.

When we sat down with him to discuss the aforementioned issues, he said, without hesitation, “I hate Chinese people” and “oh the yelp review? I don’t really care what other people think about me”

He was fired, and then he and his friend came back into the store a week later to pick up a fight with another team member.

Maveric315

38. Give Himself Courage

I work in an industry with mandated drug and alcohol testing for all safety-related positions. One day one of my techs – a good, reliable guy – has his name pop up to be tested, so I ask him to shoot down to the drug testing contractor for a sample. He does. A few days later I get a call from the contractor saying that he tested positive for alcohol. I call him into the office, and ask him, “WTF?” and he says he has a hard time peeing in front of people, so he stopped by the bar for a couple of beers on the way to the testing place to give himself courage. That was his last day. Nice guy, but a complete idiot.

Doodlemeyer

39. The First Thing She Did

This is the first and only person I fired in my 5 years as a manager.

One of my student employees had two on-campus jobs. She was fired from her other one before coming in for her shift for me (IT Help Desk), and the first thing she did was change her old boss’ password, delete the emails that said she was fired, and send a couple of emails out basically saying “just kidding she’s not fired.”

All of this stuff is tracked, so I found out immediately. I brought her in for a meeting, told her what I knew, and asked “Am I right in my version of this story?” She nodded and started crying, I felt terrible, but I said “You’ve left me no choice but to fire you. I also have to report this to the university board of ethics.”

She cried in my office for a while, and I asked her if I could call a friend to take her somewhere, or if there was anything she wanted to talk about. She finally looked up at me and asked, “Does this mean I won’t get to decorate the help desk for Christmas?”

I didn’t really feel bad after that.

40. Fight or Flight Response

We had a lifeguard once who failed to save a child drowning right in front of him. So I had to run from across the pool deck, jump in, and grab the kid. We figured since he was new he was probably just scared or whatever so we decided we would start auditing him more (this is when we take a lifelike doll and drop it somewhere in the pool and the guard has to go in and get it within a certain time frame. The guard won’t know this is about to happen and so thus trains your fight or flight response to save the person). So we doll drop him. Instead of going in he calls for a manager and asks if he’s getting audited, to which I said yes. He then asks if I can get the doll for him because he doesn’t want to get his hair wet. I fired him.