Have you ever looked at someone and thought "how the hell did they even decide to do such a thing?" In the workplace, let's say. It looks like every one of us has a somewhat similar understanding of what we can do, what we can’t do and what actions would get us fired immediately. But you know what, turns out some basic understanding and work ethics does not apply in every workplace.
Speaking about that, recently one Reddit user asked community members to share the most fireable things that they have seen their coworkers do that didn’t impact their employment status. And let me tell you, this will make you question so many things about companies' values and ethics.
More info: Reddit
#1
He hit the OSHA inspector with a forklift.
Image credits: ScarnAndMacklinFBI
#2
When I worked retail, I once challenged a customer to step outside and fight. The customer - I'll never forget this - said, "Dude, you're at work," and walked out, shaking his head. Sometimes the customer is right!
Image credits: Brand_Ex2001
#3
Had a guy at work do these things during his time at a place I worked and he never got fired:Accidentally set fire to the trees out back whilst taking a pee, he was bored and lighting ants on fire. Fire truck had to come put it out - scorched earth!
Ignored instructions from a spotter and dropped a 250k machine whilst the spotter was underneath (luckily, the legs on the machine prevented any injury). Edit: I was wrong, she wasn’t underneath just very close and looking underneath.
Threw a plastic 55g drum at the owner in a fit of drunken rage.
Got pulled over 25 minutes away from work 25 minutes after his shift and got a dui - blew a 0.21 and was in the local paper.
Got drunk on moonshine from the back fridge, went into the bar bathrooms (during business hours) and pulled his infected tooth out with a pair of channel-locks, stole the bartenders tips and drove home a bloody drunken mess. Bathroom was an absolute disaster.
Routinely stole cash, beer, and merch.
Threw a glass at me once, but that wasn’t really all that bad.
Pulled the wrong valve off of the bottom of a tank and lost ~800 gallons of beer before I could get it back on for him
Some of the things from the top of my head, it was a while back now but he eventually quit.
Image credits: Mc00p
#4
It was me, but I faked a coworkers death by putting a makeshift memorial up in his assigned parking spot on April 1st. It had his picture, flowers, a handful of candles, the whole deal. The head of HR was not amused. Everyone else loved it, though.To make matters worse, this was during peak covid. I had just returned from a small vacation and had no idea my friend i did this to had been out for 3 days due to suspected covid.
Image credits: dlebs83
#5
Work drunk.This was in car sales. Dude showed up drunk or heavy hangover constantly. But he sold a lot of cars, somehow, so they didn’t care
Image credits: MurtZero1134
#6
"What are you gonna do? Fire me? I'm your only line cook that'll take 3 waiters, a bus boy, and the dish washer with me if I leave!" I was the dish washer.
Image credits: EshoWarCry
#7
Accidentally send out the entire company's (3,000+ employees) headcount to the company distro. File contained everyone's salary, birthday, government numbers,etc.
Image credits: Yead1971
#8
tried his damndest to sleep with the bosses wife while out at a work party. got fired months later for something completely unrelated
Image credits: bluebirdgoogle
#9
I used to be a chemist in the lab, and I swear to God, every lab had one psycho. Our resident psycho had it out for one of the girls for some reason, and had to be physically restrained by another guy from attacking her. He didn’t like something she was talking about (he was an angry chauvinist). Another time he threatened to “bash her head into the glass window “. Management and HR did absolutely nothing, in fact they blamed her. She ended up taking him to court and filing a restraining order. He was forced onto a different shift and had to leave the property before she came in. Way to protect your own employees, a******s. Oh, and he accused everyone of being secretly gay together. Good times.
Image credits: Ilovethe90sforreal
#10
Watched a coworker rent an entire big box retail store parking lot to a BMW dealership for cash on the side so they could park excess inventory.Corporate didn't know. He pocketed all the money.
Image credits: OopsNiceTry
#11
In a hospital the person went out to get a patient and called out in the waiting room, "Where's my little (insert name of disease the infant had) baby?" Basically just told all the people in the room what disease the baby had and the mother's jaw dropped and was furious. Nothing happened. She ended up quitting on her own 3-4 years later.
Image credits: Candersx
#12
Worked at a Video Game retailer, yeah that one, back when I was fresh out of college. The Nintendo Wii was due to be released the following week and we were no longer taking pre-orders. Some guy comes in with his girlfriend and wanted to preorder but couldn’t so he tried to bribe my coworker with $20 to get one anyway. Store was full of customers and our supervisor was present. Coworker busts out laughing, walks around the counter, puts an arm around the guys shoulder, literally busting a gut, wheezing with laughter. Suddenly he stops laughing, looks the guy dead in the face and yells, “20 bucks?!?! GO SUCK A D**K!”Guy’s face turned bright red and his girlfriend and the entire store started laughing at him. Never saw the guy again. Manager said that was hilarious but don’t ever do that again.
Coworker was let go months later for gift card fraud shortly after I was promoted and transferred to another store.
Image credits: deceptivekhan
#13
Supervisor freaked the f**k out on the sales guy and just clocked out. It was a super busy shipping day and he was just done. He got to the end of the driveway and turned around and clocked back in and they just acted like he didn't tell them to f**k off lol
Image credits: GuySaysStuff
#14
A director of customer engagement publicly, in a department wide recorded meeting, told everyone he was going to participate in wage theft against his subordinates. I've never downloaded and saved a zoom meeting faster. Then, when he didn't get reprimanded or anything, I took that video to the labor board and sued them for wage theft. It just boggles my mind how a popular, well known start up would allow someone like that to remain on staff. Last I heard, half the call center was going after them for wage theft under the same condition that I did.
Image credits: crashsaturnlol
#15
It's a tie...1) Supervisor engaged in sexual intercourse with one of his associates bent over her work space.
2) Supervisor leaving a company function, hit two cars in front of three cops, ran, ran a red light, then drove back to the plant, across the back lot, bogged down to the axels and was caught trying to run away on foot.
Image credits: elciddog84
#16
Used a racial slur toward a Jewish co-worker in front of a customer. He claimed he didn't know that calling him a "Cheap J*w" was bad because all Jewish people love their money.He was fired about a year later for sexual comments toward a married female customer.
Image credits: TuPacSchwartz411
#17
The dude showed up drunk to work. He drove.Manager sent him home. I asked why he wasn't fired and she said it was because he never clocked in, so he technically wasn't intoxicated at work.
Looking back, I think that manager really wanted to jump that guys bones.
Image credits: BW_Bird
#18
A guy got a dui and lost his license for three months and didn't tell anyone at work about. He drove a company truck daily for work and they only found out after he got his license back. I know he was still there 5 years later.
Image credits: Hinter-Lander
#19
Not do her job. Find any excuse to avoid work. Spend half the day chatting on the phone. Then work unapproved overtime, claiming that she had too much work and needed to catch up. Yes, I'm talking about you, Stephanie. Worst co-worker I ever had.
Image credits: mom_with_an_attitude
#20
F**k his assistant in our wellness room DURING business hours.
Image credits: galaxygirlthrowaway
#21
I worked in a kitchen in high school and a guy bled on a pizza and stills served it.
Image credits: yeahwellokay
#22
Literally not working. She would get to work at 6:30 and I would see her leaving as I pulled in at 8:00. Her boss hadn’t even arrived yet. This was like 4-5 days per week. She maybe stayed till 2:00 on the good days. They tried to fire her and were told it was impossible to fire anyone for anything at a university. They waited for the grant to run out and then didn’t put her on the new one. It took 2 years.
Image credits: chimney_sweep
#23
Worked a 24 hour shift doing manual labour. Then got into a truck, drove 2 hrs to another site do another 8 hour shift. Coerced a few underlings to join him. Then they had to drive home… 34 hours of working without sleep, driving public roads in that state thinking they where tough as s**t…The boss was an absolute scumbag, but even he had the sense to know that this was truly irresponsible. This was solely on the head of the narcissistic egomaniac foreman who thought he was the toughest badass around and only those who could follow him where the good workers.
Needless to say I opted out. I wasn’t on the foreman’s good side and he made my life hell for two years. In a way I’m thankful I learned so much about life and people in that time. I hit a massive low point in my life working with that man. But I came out stronger at the other end.
He was never reprimanded for this, and all the other things he did, which was unfortunate. But I’m happy to now be earning way above what he is. And he’s probably still destroying his body in the name of being a rough bastard.
Image credits: Visual-Boat-Hire
#24
Talking s**t about the manager while sitting about 50 feet from his desk- manager just walked away
Image credits: Difficult-Load-5588
#25
Long ago, when bookstores existed in the mall, I worked for one that had satellite calendar kiosks during the holiday season.Dude who was working at the kiosk "accidentally" put two endorsed-by-the-register checks into his pocket instead of in the till and went home.
At the end of the night, there were some frantic phone calls made to figure out where this check went so they could balance the registers. When I came in the next morning, the assistant manager who had dealt with the whole situation was visibly frustrated that Dude had not been even been written up.
He was such a weird guy. Always stared a little too long after you finished talking.
Image credits: Deep-Jello0420
#26
Constantly watched people drink on the job and couldn’t say anything because management was doing it too.#27
I worked in a freezer for a while. All my bosses in there with us were pretty laid back. The best thing they said was they didn’t care if we smoked weed on the job, as long as we could do our job. Well one of the people who took advantage of that was the forklift operator. One day, while high, ran my foot over. It didn’t hurt too bad, just had a wicked bruise. I personally don’t blame him because we were talking just before it happened and my foot was in front of a wheel and he had something on his forks, so he didn’t see my foot. Management didn’t do anything about it. He was driving the next day.There was also someone on 3rd shift who kept running into the sliding door that divided the freezer from the shipping dock. He ran into it like 3 times in 2 weeks before they told him they were gonna have him do something else
Image credits: 9eagle9_2nd
#28
Worked at a deli for a summer that hired a bunch of high school kids with a large sweaty checked out manager. I was one of the high school kids. One of the other two had a block of havarti cheese they just opened to cut off six slices for a old lady. It was near the end of the day so instead of putting the rest of the block of cheese in syran wrap and in the refrigerator he put it down the garbage disposal. Just pushed it down with barbeque tongs while doing the "shhhh" gesture at me with his lips and other index finger. I just thought "Well that's f****d up."
Image credits: Illiterarian
#29
in my life i had one job outside of being self-employed: head of the IT department for a local retailer with three in-state locations and two out-of-state locations. everything was going great. new websites built, new software for the employees to list items online built, new inventory system setup, marketing going well, etc. this was until nepotism kicked in. see, we were doing millions in ad buys on TV and low-and-behold the son of the lady we did these buys through needed a job. so he's hired and it was immediately clear this kid had no clue what he was doing. but he had some pull. he fancied himself a nerd so he started tinkering with our site. not a dev branch, i'm talking production. the live website. soon after we got hacked. it took me some time to find out how the shell got onto our server. turns out dips**t, while making his unneeded changes, f****d with various security settings on our site. this led directly to us getting owned. it was all in the logs. i documented what he did and the consequences of it. we had to take the website down so internet sales immediately stopped. i had to go through all of the source code to make sure there weren't any other backdoors lurking. it was a PITA. the kid never faced any consequences for this. i quit soon after and went back to self-employment. fun times!
Image credits: sporks_and_forks
#30
Curse out the boss in front of an entire team of employees (not me)
Image credits: FuzzyGabbagool
#31
Leave 30 mins into the shift without telling anyone and logging it as a full 8hr day#32
I was doing some kind of apprentice's/studying and working thing.During semester breaks we were working, or would need to take time off. That meant informing who you were working with (as soon as you would know), going through a tool process for requesting your time off, checking back it was approved.
People were surprised when a colleague didn't show up on the first day after the semester. He hadn't called in sickm. After not being there until mid day, the department he should be at called our supervisor. The supervisor checked if there were time off or sickness and they simply forgot to inform department? Nope.
So they called him. It took more than one try, but he answered and told them
"oh yeah. I'm in new York. Sorry I forgot to inform the department or put in time off, I won't be there until two weeks."
He was not fired - and this would be one of the few actual offenses for which that _would have been possible_. Which is _hard_ in my country (rightfully so).
Even worse, he was also not made to return immediately and I never heard anything about any other repercussions (albeit I simply may have missed them).
I'm still blinking and wondering. That's not a "oopsie". It's traveling to another continent! It takes _months_ of planning. Yet no one even knew. He didn't simply forget to enter it, he told _no one_. Not even colleagues. And nothing came of it.
Image credits: deterministic_lynx
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