The Stupid Mistakes That Got People Fired

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.