To err is human. To forgive is divine. To forgive again is generous. To forgive again and again and again is probably just stupid.
This piece is based on an AskReddit thread. Link on the last page.
1/21. Worked at a small radio station. Guy who was on air before me would record the local news for me to play at 6pm. It was pre-recorded so if he messed up, he could just start over and edit that part out.
Well, one day he forgets that he messed up so he doesn’t edit it. I play the news on-air at 6 and in the middle I hear “GOD DAMNIT NOW I HAVE TO DO THIS F*****G THING AGAIN!”
And then in his super-polished, friendly radio voice: “Hi I’m Jim Thomas with your 6 o’clock news update.” Not sure how he didn’t get fired.
-paulvs88
2/21. A guy I worked with got a DUI in a company-owned car with used car dealer plates on it, doing 75 in a 35 with 5 people in the car. He’s is now the manager.
-ninjaplease26
3/21. This guy accidentally emailed the salaries of about 1,000 employees to those employees, so everyone got to see how much more money the new guy who was worse than them made.
It cost a lot of money to level all those salaries.
-HighOnGoofballs
4/21. At one hotel I worked at, this one girl got caught dropping empty drop envelopes into the safe and taking the cash. I’m talking about hundreds of dollars per shift for multiple shifts.
She was attractive though. I think the owner liked staring at her.
By the time I quit, she was still there.
-michikade
5/21. I got a phone call from employee with a company car that starts with: “So I just ran over this dude…” (continued…)
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Turns out dude had dementia or something, not the first time he had dashed out into traffic. I felt so sorry for him. His family did nothing. No insurance claim, no lawsuit, no nothing. His daughter came outside, yelled at him (the guy who got hit by the car).
No idea how we ended up with no liability, not how the employee managed to hold onto his job.
-gwana
6/21. Worked on a project back in 1999 where we wrote a trading system for one of the largest brokerage firms in California. It was already in production for 6 months when my co-worker was adding a new feature to simplify the order entry.
So at his desk he shows a quick demo to our boss where he enters a BUY order for 10,000 shares of IBM. Suddenly, he starts screaming in pure abject fear at the top of his lungs repeatedly saying: “I AM ON PRODUCTION, I AM ON PRODUCTION.”
Turns out he actually bought over $1 million of IBM stock while he thought he was giving a demonstration. Our boss immediately runs down to the trading floor in a panic to tell the head trader that they will need to unwind this.
I assumed we were all getting fired. Later in the day I asked my boss what happened and he just says “they ended up making some money on the trade” and nothing ever came of it.
Thank goodness.
-RealThagSimmons
7/21. I worked at a pet store for a long time. We had a bacterial outbreak and were bleaching individual tanks (once separated from main sump) and then dechlorinating the tanks and testing them before putting them back in with the main sump system.
We had been performing the process for about a week at that point, but apparently one of my coworkers hadn’t been paying attention at all during that time period. (continued…)
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She reattached a tank half-full of bleach to the main tank system. As I walked into the store (it was my day off; I was just there for lizard food), I just see the majority of the fish moving around listlessly.
Then they started death-spiralling. I point this out to my coworkers and they start freaking out. One of them starts dumping bottles of dechlorinator into the system.
Meanwhile, the coworker responsible for this mess fishes out her favorite fish, blood parrot cichlids, and starts blowing into their gills, trying to do some crappy approximation of CPR. She ends up throwing them into the separate sick tank in hopes of saving them.
Anyway, she killed 99% of the fish and I had to help shovel out their corpses while crying the entire time.
She didn’t get fired and never even apologized for what she had done.
-nerdhappyjg
8/21. He was the GM of the factory where I worked. The owner was his college roomie, and he was only at work a maximum of 40 hours out of 80 in the two-week pay period.
He would leave in the mornings and go do his other job, leaving me (production manager) to run the place, and then come back towards the end of the day. He still billed the owner 80 hours per two-week pay period. He did this for at least 6 months.
I told the owner when I left the company. They had “a long chat.” He still works there. His name was literally Chad.
-Srslywhyumdbro
9/21. A guy I work with has been caught with sex workers in his work truck on company time.
Twice.
-Addicus
10/21. Facilities maintenance company I worked for got taken over by a new company. The new company was terrible to work for. One of the guys was getting really stressed out and since his wife made big bucks she told him to quit. So he figured he might as well do it in a fun, interesting way. (continued…)
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Instead of giving two weeks notice, he decided to just start disregarding all rules of decency and see how long it took them to get rid of him.
He began to just come and go as he pleased, stole whatever he wanted, used the shop area and company supplies to work on personal projects for his house. This went on for over a year.
Finally, they promoted him out of his position into management. Unbelievable.
-A_HORRIBLE_PERSON
11/21. Had tantrums; screamed at me because I called her out for falsifying reports to the government; smashed her keyboard on her desk snapping it in two; was openly sexist and racist.
I got fired.
I spoke to a lawyer. They said I had a solid case but I got a job offer two days later for twice the money. It was financially better to let it go.
-PM_ME_BEEF_CURTAINS
12/21. I was at a strip club in vegas with an ad exec who charged THIRTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS on his corporate card over the course of the night. Not a consequence.
-Begbie3
13/21. It was actually me. I still have no idea what I was thinking.
The owners of the company all showed up for a meeting, and gave this 30-minute long speech about how much they value our work and they wanted to reward us. They started handing out checks, i open it up and see $2,000.
Now, I dont make a ton of money and I was having health issues and been to the ER a few times in the last few months. So this money would literally save me.
Everyone was all excited and very surprised our management who were known to be penny pinches that didnt care at all about employees would do this.
Then I realized what the catch was. (continued…)
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The checks were all dated for for two years from now. They said if we stayed with the company with no write-ups and never miss a day of work we could cash those checks in two years.
I just lost it… I walked up the front of the presentation, held my check up, ripped it into shreds, and said: “This is some serious bull****. And I threw the shreds at the owners.
Surprisingly, I wasnt fired. Probably because I am the highest producing employee in the company. Or maybe they realized toying with people like that really wasnt a good idea. Who knows.
-Jesta23
14/21. A coworker came in still drunk from the night before. Her partner called the boss, who showed up and told her to get a shower and sleep it off. We work for a 911 EMS service!
-Mephestos_halatosis
15/21. Back when I was doing my student teaching, a teacher punched a student in the face and did not get fired.
In his defence, the kid was 17 and thought it would be funny to rip the wig off of a female teacher who was going through chemo. The teacher who did the punching was right there and it was pretty much an immediate reaction. Not a single person in that school blamed that teacher for what he did.
-partofbreakfast
16/21. I used to work at a fast food chain restaurant as a cook. One Sunday it was extra busy around lunch time and one of the cashiers kept messing up orders. My assistant general manager, who at the time was cooking with me, got so frustrated with the cashier that he took all the food that was on the grills and fryers and threw it against a wall.
One. Pan. At. A. Time.
-Christopher_Ocean
17/21. I worked at a pizza place 4 or 5 days a week after school, and everyone else that worked there was a boy; not a single female but me. (continued…)
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The boys that I worked with acted as you would expect, picking on me and always making me the butt of their jokes. I wasn’t too bothered, i can handle a joke pretty well.
One boy, named Tyler, took it really far and told me he was “going to have sex with me,” and kept grabbinh my chest after I repeatedly told him not to.
I told the manager about it, and instead of the reaction I had hoped for, my manager laughed in my face. I quit the next day.
-haether
18/21. IT-guy deleted all bills from the last five days. The accountant came in and yelled at him for 40 minutes straight, went home and couldn’t speak for nearly three days. Our CEO didn’t fire the IT-guy because he was one of his friends.
Other coworkers and I had to call about 200 other companies to ask them if they had received a bill from us.
At the end, somebody got the glorious idea to ask the mailman where the postal service sent those bills and saved our asses. If the taxman had found out about this incident… whew
-asdlpg
19/21. Co-worker would read erotic Harry Potter fan fiction on her workstation for at least 6 hours a day at 40+pt font size.
-Qysses
20/21. As a teacher, years ago, two of my colleagues got caught hooking up in the school parking lot …by a student. The man remained a PE teacher at the same school until he retired about 5 years later.
The woman continued to teach in the same school district until a few years later as well. When she became local union president.
-hedgehogmilkshakes
21/21. The receptionist at my old office once had a very uncomfortable exchange with a client. Client was showing her pictures of her kids. The receptionist goes: “wow, they’re very dark. You must have a tanning bed at home.”
Client wrinkles her face and replies: “um, no. My husband is Black.”
Somehow not fired.
-Anonymous