Managers hate having to fire people. Even when they deserve it, there is always the change the person will lose their minds. Only a few will completely go nuts, like the people in these stories.
(Content has been edited for clarity.)
Stealing From The Boss
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So she is standing there staring me down, I turn on my monitor and open the saved video of her opening my desk and taking my wallet out and money, she lunges at the computer trying to break it at which point I pinned her on the ground and called the police. Ended up being such a huge issue, and the crazy thing is she wasn’t even immediately fired. We had like three meetings with her making up loads of nonsense to get me fired. It caused a lot of drama for me. They end up terminating her, and in that phone call, I tell them I quit and that the company that hired me was hiring me on directly and cutting them off as a contractor.”
A Close Call
“My dad has been a ‘boss’ for most of his career. He supervises bus drivers for a living.
We used to live in a rural area — my mom used to joke that it was ‘the last stop before Alaska’ (for crazy people).
One winter, my dad had to call this big, burly, young bus driver into his office to fire him. This guy had used racial epithets against some of his riders — these were elementary school kids, mind you. It had happened more than once, he’d been warned, and now my dad was going to cut him loose.
My dad told me that he was pretty sure this dude was going to come across the table at him — the guy was red in the face, barely had a lid on his rage, made some vague threats my dad, of course, can’t remember. My dad was legitimately shaken up when the guy finally left but got on with his day.
That night, back at home, my dad was out working in the garage with the garage door open. We lived WAY out in the sticks, and across from our front yard was a big field with trees scattered here and there. Dad’s working in the garage, when all of a sudden he hears a huge BANG, like a weapon going off. Dad drops to the ground and remembers the kid he just fired that day and starts to flip out. This idiot is across the street taking freaking SHOTS at him. Dad holds still a few minutes and hears nothing else, so he crawls over to the side of the garage and pulls himself up using the handle of a drawer on his workbench, ready to go in and call the cops.
As he stands up, he opens the drawer he used to pull himself up, and realizes that the BANG he heard was actually…a can of soda pop in the drawer that had frozen and exploded in the frigid midwinter night.”
Dumb Things To Do At Work
“I once fired a guy for having lied about an MBA on his CV. I also fired the HR rep who cleared him. The guy who lied about the MBA didn’t do anything drastic other than making some smart aleck comment about having gotten about $70,000 out of the company before we found out. He was a solid asset to the firm and made money for us, but I don’t tolerate liars. The HR rep, however, went ballistic. He went into my office, whipped out his junk, and urinated on my desk right in front of me.
Earlier in life, when I was fresh out of college, I was a warehouse manager/foreman. I caught a guy shooting up in the break room and fired him. It was a union warehouse, so he went to his union rep. I wasn’t a member of the union even though I did a lot of the same work they did because I was technical management. Regardless, the head of the union local at that warehouse and I were pretty good friends at the time. When he came to me asking for an across the board 3.5-percent raise for the next fiscal year during contract renewal negotiations, I told my boss we couldn’t keep the crew for anything less than eight percent and ended up getting them 5.5 percent (I have a soft spot for hard-working labor). So anyway, I told the union rep what was up and that the idiot I fired was shooting up at work, and he told me the union wouldn’t contest the termination. The guy I fired slashed my tires.”
She Raged Too Hard
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“I had to fire a secretary once, and she flipped out on me. It was awkward as she did not work for me, but I was her official supervisor as she was on my department’s payroll (my department was profitable, and the department she worked for was new and not yet profitable). Even more awkward was the fact that although she was being fired for extensive tardiness, the real reason was that she had recently gotten herself addicted to speed, including allegations that she used at work.
On a Friday morning, when she bothered to show up late again after about 10 warnings, I asked her to meet with me in a shared office. When she entered, she noticed that my boss was there as was the head of the department she worked for, and we had the company’s general counsel on the speakerphone. She knew what was up and got combative immediately, but she appeared to give in and started to cry, so she asked to used the ladies room before she left. A friend of hers followed her in, and we here a commotion followed by some shouting, then the noise of shattering glass. I thought things were already out of hand, but when we opened to the door I could not believe what she had done.