It doesn’t matter where it takes place, terrible employees exist everywhere. At the local fast-food joint or at our current gig, but unfortunately, we have to deal with it until they either quit or get fired. Well, these people saw the opportunity and now share the reason they got someone fired. Content has been edited for clarity purposes.
Teen Vs A Grown Adult
“I was a worker at McDonald’s and only sixteen at the time. We had a new employee and he was on grills as I was on the table right behind him. There was another side to the table that cannot see the grills through the cabinets of food, so when any cook-to-order meat, in this case, quarter pounder, was finished, the grill person would call ‘Quarter’s up!’
So side two would know to get their meat and send the burger on its way.
Well, our new employee absolutely refused to talk near me. I didn’t really get it, he would talk to other people. But he wouldn’t call out ‘Quarter’s up’ for the life of him. After multiple times of doing it myself, I finally stopped and took the meat and held it back to him, and asked him to call it out himself. He slammed it into the table and splattered grease into it. I stood there and told him he needed to call out ‘Quarter’s up’ for side two. He would not, he turned back to his grills and ignored me.
I called out ‘Quarter’s up’ and slid them their meat, and the shift continued. I stopped calling out ‘Quarters’ up’, mostly because I was busy keeping up with the lunch rush and didn’t notice when he slid the meat onto the table out of my line of sight. And out of side two’s sight.
So a manager asked why side two was so slow, and they explained they didn’t have their quarter meat and I would slide it over to them and apologize. Someone would tell the grill person to call it out, and the shift would continue again until he went on break.
I didn’t actually know anything had happened until the big boss of the store was called in and he came rushing up to me and told me very sternly, ‘If someone threatens you like that again, you need to tell management immediately!’
I did not understand. Nobody threatened me.
Turns out, when the grill dude went on break, he loudly told everyone how he was going to ‘beat the living out of that little kid.’
And well, he got fired.”
Entitled Employee
“I was waiting in line at McDonald’s and there were three rowdy children in front of me; I’m guessing 10, 11, 12, around those ages. I was standing behind and reading a book, not interacting with the kids at all. They ordered ice cream, paid, and left the line. I stepped up to the counter and the cashier, a young girl who was probably in high school, walked away. I figured she was going to get something with which to clean her hands because ice cream can be messy and sticky.
I was waiting and, after a while, I saw the cashier peek around the corner from the kitchen area and she said to a co-worker, ‘She’s still there.’
Mind you, there were also others in line behind me. So I realized she apparently had no intention of returning to her station. I moved to another line, as did the customers behind me.
The place was really busy now, and a manager came out and took over the register where the girl had been ringing up customers. I purposely got into this line and, when it was my turn, I placed my order and said to the manager, ‘You may want to let the young lady who was at this register previously know that if she’s going to leave her post and not return, she really should let the customers in line know that the register is now closed.’
The manager asked me what had happened, so I told her. Another customer overheard the conversation and backed me up.
‘Thank you for letting me know,’ the manager said in a kind of strained voice.
So I got my food, sat down, and began to eat. Shortly after, two employees entered the ladies’ room. As they came out, I recognized one of them as the girl who left her register.
‘That grouch! She got me fired!’ she was exclaiming to her now ex-co-worker. ‘I can’t believe it! I shouldn’t have to work anyway; my parents have A LOT of money! They’re RICH!’
She didn’t see me or, if she did, she didn’t recognize me.
As the place settled down, the manager came around, checking to see if anyone needed anything. I told her what I had observed with the two girls exiting the restroom and told her I never intended to get anyone fired. I’ve worked many jobs and there’s always a learning curve, especially at first.
‘That was the fourth complaint I’ve had about her today, and she was only here today for about two hours,’ the manager told me.
It turns out the young lady had been working there for two weeks and had numerous complaints about her. The manager knew her parents, who had told her their daughter expected to get everything she wanted without doing any work for it, and they thought she needed to have a job. My comment just happened to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
“He Was Not A Fan Of Women”
“I was a single mom of two toddlers. I’ve been raised that you work for what you need. So I didn’t take any handouts from anyone. For many years I worked in a steel mill. The pay was great and the benefits couldn’t be beaten. I proved to my bosses time and again that I could do any job in the mill. Not all the lines were used every day, so they didn’t have anyone assigned to operate them. They pulled people from lines that didn’t need to be run that day.
So one day I was assigned to a two-man job on one of the straighteners. A man named Mike was to be the other person. Mike was not a fan of women working in the mill. And he certainly was not going to work with one of them. He was in his 40s, never married, and had worked at the mill for over 20 years. His usual job was a cushy one since he had so much seniority. He was told to go to the line and work with me.
He said, ‘No.’
It was a one-day thing, and I had worked with most of the men at some point, so he knew I could handle my end. The boss explained this to him, but he still said no. This went on for about a half-hour until the boss fired him for insubordination. I felt terrible. Even though he was a ‘male chauvinist pig’, the term we used way back when I hated to see him throw away 20 years. It wasn’t my call. He was fired and I have no idea what happened to him.”
Worst Co-Worker Ever
“The woman I worked with was a liar, a manipulating wench, and a mediocre employee. She was also very predictable. She took too long on breaks and lunch, always at the same time. She called in sick on the same days of the calendar, month after month.
She was putting work she was assigned to on my desk. I realized she was giving me her work, but instead of turning in the claims for filing, I finished them, scanned them under my folders, and set them aside in the supplies closet. Since I never said anything about the additional work, she increased her to dump of her to-do items in my in-box.
During an audit of all the claims, the auditor went to the filing room to verify the documents were on hand. Oddly, none of her assigned files were available. She was questioned, but because she hadn’t done the work nor did she know about the supplies closet box, she couldn’t explain where they were or why she didn’t have the electronic files available. She was fired for theft.
I took the box to the file room and returned to the normal functions. The next audit was a 100 percent pass.
No, I don’t feel bad about it. She created this drama on her own.”
Jealous Much?
“In the summer of 2019, I worked at a semi-truck rim company. I had yet to get the hang of the measurements for rim’s so I was yet to get hired in. At the time, I was a temp to hire.
Some dude, who we’ll call ‘Bob’ started about a month after I did and got hired in before I did due to him working there before and knowing the measurements. Now my supervisors told him numerous times he was not my boss in any way. Bob didn’t like that, and he also didn’t like the fact that I was the second-fastest worker in the whole factory, while he happened to be the slowest.
Well, one day I got stuck working with him because my usual partner was out sick. Now Bob decided he wanted to take a 10-minute break not even five minutes after we clocked in for our shift. I proceeded to start and bust out a few rims on my own. Once Bob came back from break, I proceeded to tell him I was going to smoke a cig. Usually, it only took me about five minutes and we were allowed to as long as we meet our 90 rim quota every night. I then left him with four rims that had to go through his machine. I came back, and lo and behold Bob wasn’t there.
So I busted out more rims on my own until Bob eventually came back. Bob declared I needed to slow down so he could keep up. I did no such thing because I was a fast worker and my machine was a minute slower than his. Bob proceeded to be slow on purpose just to ruin my production time. I did what was considered impossible and got six rims ahead of him. The highest was normally four, and by ahead I mean they still had to go through his machine.
Now on our stations, our rims got scratched and dented because they had to go through another process once they left us. So I stacked five on the tables and one on the floor. Bob proceeded to get in my face and try to fight me, saying he didn’t want a rim on the floor. Then proceeded to take that same rim off the table after I made room for it and threw it on the floor, repeating his previous statement.
I walked off the platform and informed my supervisors. However, I ended up getting fired because he lied to HR saying I threatened to kill him. I said no such thing.
At the beginning of summer 2020, Bob started working the first shift at my current job. I tried to be professional and show him the ropes, but he decided he wanted to throw a metal shovel into a grinder that can only grind plastic, and continued to block my path and let the grinder destroy itself. My superiors knew of my prior work incident and saw the shovel incident (just not him blocking my path) and asked what I wanted to do with him.
Now keep in mind, I don’t normally hold grudges, but I got fired from a job I loved because he got butthurt I was better than him. So when he blocked my path during the grinder incident, it was evident that he was trying to cost me my job here as well. So as my superiors asked what I and I alone wanted to do with him, I said, ‘Fire him.'”
He Looked Good In A Suit, But That Wasn’t Enough For This Job
“I was a manager at a Honda store in San Francisco in the ’70s. One of our better salesmen recommended to the sales manager that we should hire his younger brother, a recent college grad. The kid presented well and looked good in a three-piece banker’s suit (all the salesmen in SF wore suits back then). On his second day on the job, I received a complaint from one of his customers that he was acting silly and was not able to answer questions about the cars. This was after four days of training on the product.
I called him into my office and tried to explain that acting like a clown was unacceptable behavior for an adult. He then stuck his thumbs in his ears and wiggled his fingers at me while chanting, ‘La la, can’t hear you, can’t hear you’ and repeated this every time I tried to speak.
After the third time, I went to his sales manager and said, ‘You have to have a talk with him. He seems to be out of control.’
After about 30 seconds of his routine, his manager fired him on the spot. I felt bad for his older brother for recommending him, but for a 23-year-old college grad to act like a 4-year-old was ridiculous.”
That One Creepy Guy At Work
“About 25 years ago, I worked for a small office. I was, for all intents and purposes, the office manager.
We had a rapid expansion and had to quickly hire some people. One was the boyfriend of the mother-in-law of one of the owners. The guy was a creep.
We had also hired a very young (maybe 19) woman as a part-time receptionist. This was her first job and she was already having difficulties adjusting from high school to the real world of working. It was quite a shock to her system to discover we expected her to work even when her friends wanted to go party. But that’s a rant for another day.
Anyway.
There were only two women working in the entire office, me and the young girl. The rest of the employees (service techs, salesmen, etc) were all male. But they were good guys and looked after me all the time and they treated the young girl like a sister.
The creepy guy had a habit of telling crude jokes. I was in my mid-30s, so I had no issues with him and his jokes. I could ignore them. I could also tell a few myself, but that’s not the point.
The young girl, however, didn’t know what to do about the jokes. She came to me and told me she was uncomfortable with them, so I made sure all the guys knew to keep their mouths shut when she was around. The techs weren’t a problem. The salesmen were all older men and never a problem because they would never have said anything crude around a lady in the first place. But, to be fair, I told them all.
Then there was the creepy guy.
Because of his self-perceived ‘status’ as the boyfriend of an owner’s mother-in-law, he apparently felt he was immune from both the rules and common decency. He continued to tell crude jokes and make the poor girl uncomfortable. He apparently thought it was funny to make her blush and get flustered. He was a prick.
One of the service techs came to me just a day or two after I told every single man in that office not to act like a prick and told me the creepy guy had actually propositioned her. She was hiding back in the service department and several of the techs were muttering about the creepy guy needing a beating.
So, back I flew to the service department, took her to one of the owners’ offices, and he and I sat her down to find out what happened. It wasn’t so much what he said as the way he said it and the fact she was too young and inexperienced to know how to handle a creep like that. She was really shaken up.
So that owner called the other owner in and told him what happened. They both asked me and the girl to leave the room, and they called the creepy guy in for a talk.
After a lot of ‘You’re a prick treating a little girl like that!’ type shouting, the creepy guy left the building, never to return.
Both owners apologized to the girl. They also had a meeting with all the guys in the office, told them what happened, and promised them the same would happen to them if they ever dared treat a lady that way.
We never had another problem with anyone in that office.”
Customer Service Gone Wrong
“I have been in customer service, one way or another, for 40+ years. I’ve done everything from waitressing, to being a birthday clown at a roller skating rink, to managing a store that was part of a national chain of electronics, to health insurance inbound calling where I helped people understand their medical insurance. The other thing you should know, I live in the Midwest, if we aren’t related to ‘Joe, down the block’, we know someone that is, or at very least, someone that knows someone that’s related.
So, needless to say, I know about customer service and what is and isn’t acceptable to say to and about a customer. Well, one day I decided I was going to drive thru the place with the golden arches. I was traveling and just wanted to get to where I needed to be. I placed my order, fairly simple, as I recall, but I always check my bag before I leave the drive-thru window; I’ve gotten the wrong food too many times. This time the food was right, but I didn’t get my drink or change.
The girl at the window who handed me my bag turned away from the window immediately after shoving the bag in my face. I sat there for a minute, thinking she was getting someone to open her drawer, having realized her mistake, but no, she was just chatting with her coworkers. I tapped on the window to get her attention. When she turned around and saw it was me, still sitting there, her whole body did an eye roll. She opened the window and asked what I wanted.
I told her, ‘I want my change and my drink.’ Which got me another eye roll.
After she practically threw those at me, I said, ‘You, have a great day.’
She did not say one thing nice to me during our entire exchange, but as she was closing the window she said, ‘You, too, old hag.’
Well, that’s not good customer service. None of it was, start to finish. So I pulled up and off to the side, I walked into the area where the registers were since that was close to the drive-thru pick-up window, I motioned her over.
When she got there, she knew she messed up, but the only thing I said to her was, ‘Get me your manager, NOW!’
I didn’t raise my voice, but I spoke very sternly. The store manager came up to the counter, and I explained what happened, and suggested the girl might need some time off work if she was feeling so poorly and disgusted about doing the job she was hired to do. The manager agreed and had someone take over her spot, so he could walk her out as he fired her. Apparently, I wasn’t the first complainant about her.
A couple of weeks later, I was talking with a friend and she was telling this story about a girl who had worked at that place with the golden arches, but she had gotten fired for calling someone an old hag in the drive-thru. I told my friend that it was me, I was the woman in the drive-thru. My friend laughed and laughed so hard I thought she was going to lose it. It seems the girl who got fired was the franchise owner’s daughter, and no one could stand her, but up to that point, no one had been willing or able to stand up to her and report her to the correct person. My friend said she should have known it was me because I don’t put up with terrible service, even at a drive-thru.”
He Cried Disability All The Time
“This guy was an A1 jagoff. When he was interviewing for the job, I had warned my boss, he was not qualified, and he had a bad attitude during the interview. They didn’t listen, they saw dollar signs as it was cheap to hire him.
Fast forward one and a half years later, this guy had proved he lied on his resume, and messed up everything he touched. He cried disability when it had NOTHING to do with his disability. He had seizures when he didn’t eat healthy. And this happened every time when he was about to be fired. He would constantly make comments, ‘That wasn’t my job description,’ when asked why he wasn’t doing his job, though it was, in writing.
If you explained anything to him, he immediately said you were being hostile towards him. I was his direct supervisor, yet I couldn’t discuss anything with him because I ‘reminded him of his ex-wife.’
This is the same guy when I walked in with a broken finger (my boss knew what happened, I was a clutz) got mad and tried reporting me to HR when I wouldn’t tell him anything more than ‘that’s my business’ when he asked what happened. He said I was being ‘rude’. This was the same week he got written up for actually making rude and hostile comments to a lot of coworkers.
Now the day he got fired was a normal day. I had sent him a detailed email, step by step how to get a piece of software installed on his computer from IT. It was really basic, but he couldn’t grasp it. So instead of 50 emails on how to type his own name, I walked to his cube to showed him how to do it.
He was staring at the page, and I said, ‘OK, let’s start this over.’
I said it with no negative tone, I was just trying to help, but he instantly snapped at me.
He told me, ‘Shut up! Wait!’
I said nothing and waited two minutes (literally, I looked at my watch) as he stared at it.
I said, ‘Ok am I done waiting?’
I had real work to do than to hold his hand, writing his name. He threw his chair back and punched the bookcase standing next to me and stormed off yelling, ‘I don’t have to take this nonsense.’
I calmly walked over to my boss, gave him a breakdown of what happened. Then I emailed our Big boss and Corporate, stating the same thing. We ran into him as we were leaving for lunch, about an hour later and he acted like he didn’t do anything. I felt the disability card was about to be pulled again.
When we got back from lunch, I had a meeting with my boss, and as I called it earlier, he tried to pull his disability card and said, ‘I could take the rest of the week off.’
I looked at my boss and just said, ‘If he’s coming back, I’m not.’
I guess that was good enough for him, he immediately walked over to this guy and told him to get his stuff, and he walked him out. He never came back.”
Uhm, Excuse Me? What Did He Say?
“Because of me, he was suspended on the spot and ‘let go’ at a later date, after a meeting with our HR manager. I could have brushed it off and kept my mouth shut, but I had too much respect for myself not to.
During my afternoon tea break, I used to treat myself to a takeaway coffee from a cafe in the foyer of our building. The newly employed guy who made my coffee was relatively friendly, and we sometimes chatted about our mutual interest in tattoos, family background, and other small-talk topics.
One day, I went to the cafe and ordered my coffee as usual. He started asking about my family background and about Japanese customs. He then enthusiastically asked me if I owned a kimono. I don’t know why I’d own one, given that I live in Australia. Suspicious of where this was going, I replied ‘No.’
What next came out his pie-hole as he handed me my coffee made me feel like I was covered in something I rather not say. I wanted to vomit.
‘It’s a shame you don’t own one, because if you did, you can wear it for me, and we could do the hanky panky,’ he said.
I replied, ‘Excuse me? What the heck did you say?’
He seemed a bit shocked but tried to laugh it off. It took all of my strength not to throw the piping hot fresh cup of coffee at his face. Instead, I went straight to the HR office which was three meters away and reported the incident. He was called into the office.
It affected his working visa. I heard he had to go back to his home country earlier than planned. Nurses and healthcare workers do not take harassment lightly nor should anybody else. Do I feel bad for him? No.”