Workers Share The Most Messed Up Things Coworkers Have Done Without Getting Fired

Are you reading this at work? Caught you! Don't worry, we won't tell. There are people doing much worse things on the job, and getting away with it. Stealing, making mistakes that cost their company millions of dollars, even feeding a customer a dirty bandaid--you name it, these incompetent coworkers have done it. In some cases, their malfeasance is so epic, it's almost admirable. Find out how much you could be getting away with at work as people share the most messed up things their coworkers did without getting so much as a reprimand.

Image by

73. A dying breed.

I worked with a guy who literally had no job. He was the "studio supervisor" but there was no activity in the studio to supervise because the studio had effectively become non-operational. He coasted for a full 8 years at this job. He would come in the morning, open his email, get coffee, gossip and complain about the industry for an hour, leave for an hour, come back for lunch, leave for another 3 hours, come back, send a few emails and then officially leave for the day. It was infuriating and majestic.

Image by

72. Don't get greedy.

Store manager got caught adding hours he didn't work to his time card. He got a reprimand and they removed the ability for managers to edit their own hours.

About a month later he gets caught using another manager's login to add more hours he didn't work. Another slap on the wrist and is still working at the same place.

Photo by bruce mars from Pexels

71. Call it a bonus.

A coworker of mine used his corporate credit card for over $10k in personal purchases. He was reprimanded, but not fired OR made to pay the company back. Within the next year he did the exact same thing and only then was he fired.

Pexels

70. Work zzz's are the best zzz's.

I had a coworker who I would repeatedly catch asleep. Not like a 2 minute doze - I’m talking hours. Has been caught multiple times, was even filmed twice by a new hire. Union won’t let him be touched - not even a suspension.

Image by

69. Nepotism is the worst.

I worked at a school for kids who need emotional support. We had a classroom aide who would scream at kids until they cried and then actively mock them for crying. These kids were 7 and came from horrifically abusive houses. It sucked to work in a place that allowed abusive behavior to continue. She was close family friends with the principal. It's very hard to help a child when they learn from a young age that adults aren't able to make things better and adults are capable of incredibly mean things.

Image by

68. Keeping it interesting in the kitchen.

Someone I worked with in a kitchen liked throwing ice cubes into the deep fryer. He'd stand far enough away that he wouldn't get splashed, which made it a complete surprise to the person working the fryer. If you've never done this, it kind of causes a mini explosion of bubbles in molten grease, which splashes everywhere and, at the very least, makes a mess.

When this got too boring, he started stealing kid's meal toys and chucking them into the fryer. It took longer for them to start melting, and if he couldn't get them out, we had to turn the thing off for the rest of the day because it takes hours for it to cool off long enough to retrieve something, and then at least another hour to heat back up. I can't remember what it was that he threw, but it caught on fire and he ended up pulling it out with a pair of metal tongs and threw it in the sink. Then he turned on the water and made (to his surprise!) a BIGGER FIRE. Did he get burned? Yes. Did he get fired? No. Did he do it again? Sort of. I think he went back to ice cubes after that.

Pexels

67. So long as he's not a pilot...

A guy I worked with ran a food truck into an airplane. When they drug-tested him he was super dirty. After being told that he'd be getting random tests for awhile, they showed up at his house within a week. Told them he couldn't because he just smoked yesterday. He was still employed when I transferred from that airport.

Image by

66. Petty revenge.

I worked a horrible retail job near the University for a bit. The store manager was asking a young employee out on dates and she turned him down. So in retaliation he secretly docked hours off of her pay check for a few months before she noticed. When she told the store owner, they back-paid her and the store manager kept his job.

Photo by Artem Beliaikin @belart84 from Pexels

65. No such thing as bad pizza.

I worked at a pizza restaurant when I was 16. Place was absolute anarchy. Impossible to get fired. I’d smoke pot with my bosses. They'd joke with me, “Try not to get TOO high today!!” All while on the clock. Supervisor would take an hour or more on his 30 min breaks and come back blasted. We’d all make ourselves free food whenever we wanted.

No one was properly trained, so obviously proper procedures were out the window. No one would claim their tips so we were being sued by the IRS. Again no one followed procedure, so the health department was on us. But mostly when I look back at those times, I remember how good the pizza was. Customers never complained, so I guess that's why none of us got fired.

Image by

64. He called it.

A coworker of mine called a customer stupid for leaving his phone behind, and refused to let him back in the theater we work at so he could find it. Phone ended up getting stolen by one of the overnight cleaners, and after a few days, was brought back and the customer finally got his phone back.

cinema_theatre_movie_film_audience-1388167-1551768413264-300x200.jpg Pixabay

63. Losing it over a pay cut.

At a previous job, we had an "employee" that was called in to clean on an as-needed basis. The employee, who we will call Fred, owed a lot of child support. After a unusually long break of not working, we called Fred in to clean the work place. I think he expected to be paid under the table, because when he was given a pay check, it was near zero because of all the back-due child support he owed that we were forced to take from his pay check. He literally started screaming, swearing, calling the boss every name you can think of, punching walls and threatened to shoot up the place. The boss still calls him back to work as needed to clean because he "is really good at cleaning."

Image by

62. They should just bring nap time back.

I was brand new on the job (corporate thing), and my new coworker came up to me on a weekend shift and said, "I was up really late last night, I'm gonna go lay down for a few minutes." Three hours later, he woke up and came out to work again, without any measure of apology. In the interim, one of the people we worked for found him asleep, and told my boss. He got a warning.

Close second being a coworker that hacked the company's network (using the term somewhat loosely) to get an internet access password we weren't allowed to have. Would have gotten away with it if he hadn't ALSO changed their file structure to have folder names like, "I want internet access." He also got just a warning.

Image by

61. Burning gamers is not cool.

A buddy of mine worked for a really big gaming company that was just about to ship a major title. Because of beta testing, there was code in the game that would disable the beta copies the day after the game officially dropped. His job was to make sure that code was removed before they burned all of the official CDs for the game's release. Guess who forgot to remove the code? That meant that anyone paying good money for the game would get an erased disc. The company had already burned tens of thousands (maybe more) of game discs and boxed them up for shipment before my buddy realized his mistake and came clean to his boss. They had to re-burn, replace, and re-box every copy of the game and do it in time to meet the launch date. Cost a lot of people a lot of extra time and grief but, ultimately, my buddy got to keep his job.

Image by

60. Company-backed mistake.

I worked at a webhosting tech support company and a coworker accidentally deleted another customer's website. This was on a Unix system, so it wasn't possible to undo the delete. He deleted the command history to cover his mistake and then told the customer that the website was lost due to a hard drive failure. The customer hadn't been keeping backups and said that he lost his entire livelihood.

The employee told management about the situation and they ran with it to avoid getting sued. They told the customer that hardware issues sometimes happen and because he hadn't opted into our managed backup services, the data loss was on him. They offered the customer several months of free webhosting as compensation and the problem went away. A week after seeing this circus play out, I put in my two weeks notice.

Image by Jan Vašek from Pixabay

59. That's one costly assumption.

A few years ago I was working in a big company in my hometown, they hired me to create a website because they wanted to get bigger.

A graphic/fashion designer in the same company thought I was hired for her department because our offices were close and because I was doing both the programming and the design of the website.

I had an appointment with another company that would help us set up secure online payments and manage inventories across our stores and the main factory.

Graphic designer welcomed the representatives of this company (not even her task at all) and cancelled the appointment and the contract because she didn't believe I was good enough with computers. I was. That dumb move cost the company millions.

Image by

58. They took him off standby.

Our department went for a team-building overnight stay abroad. The next day when we were supposed to meet at the airport one of my coworkers was nowhere to be found, his phone was off, bosses rang the hospitals, missing persons report, you name it, a week later the bosses went back to the country to find him. Again, nothing, wife and child hadn't heard anything. A week later he turns up for work like nothing happened. Turns out he had gotten to the airport early, and he had decided to jump on a earlier flight to Thailand for a week's holiday without telling a soul. After meeting with the bosses, never mentioned again, guess his wife made him feel it but that was never disclosed.

Pixabay

57. He's doing his best. Ish.

I work in the office of a major retailer. I have a coworker who's made several negligent blunders that have cost the company millions in lost sales. He has regularly failed to monitor the flow of advertised goods until it is too late to react. Lost sales. He once decided that if someone he works with screws up, it isn't his problem to fix it. He wouldn't even tell them about it so they could fix it. Of course, it quite literally is his problem to fix it. This caused lots of failed shipments and flows that, again, caused lost sales. He failed to monitor inventory levels on regular stock items. Sales obviously spiked during Christmas time, which has caused him to run out on half his inventory and thus lose sales. As of yet, he still hasn't fully normalized all of it.

To my knowledge, he's only recently gotten a formal reprimand, for that last one. How it took so long is beyond me.

Image by

56. Time off for the sister she never had.

Had a girl steal money from other coworkers' bags in the locker/change room. Instead of firing her they just took the door off the room and put in a camera so now we have to show up to work in uniform with a shirt over it, it's very hot here and I end up sweaty by the time I get to work.

She also called in one time saying her sister died and needed time off. She never had a sister.

After all this she got rehired after she quit for another job that didn't end up working out.

Pexels

55. That's not pepperoni.

I work in a hotel kitchen, a really nice hotel that does a lot of room service. I get in for the night, and my co-worker is fielding a call of a VERY LOUD guest. I can tell it is going bad....VERY BAD. He hangs up, looks down in sadness for a bit, gets up and slowly walks to the kitchen. He asks to see the chef's hand.

Cook looks down and notices his band-aid is missing. It had made its way into a pizza that went up to a customer. The customer said his wife had it in her mouth.

No.....not fired.

Image by

54. What you do on your breaks is your business.

A guy who works at a local grocery store would get caught pleasuring himself at work with the bathroom stall door open, he was caught so much that he was eventually relocated to the gas station. He has a serious attitude problem because he thinks that management is discriminating against his activity because he's overweight.

Image by

53. Has anyone met the new employee?

I worked in a fast food restaurant and the general manager committed full-blown fraud. He created an employee out of thin air and managed to get away with paying this direct deposit "employee" 40 hours a week for 3 months before he was caught. They just suspended him and didn't pursue the 3 months of extra pay he was paying himself through this fake employee he created.

Pexels

52. Keeping a record.

At my old job, a coworker had a folder of pictures of his own private parts on his work drive along with other explicit pictures. I reported it to HR, giving them a copy of the folder on a USB and everything.

Guy still works there to this day as far as I know. Weird dude. They did ask me if I wanted my USB drive back, told them to keep it, no amount of formatting will wipe that away.

Image by

51. Forgot to hit the snooze button.

Our union rep walked into my office to talk to a guy, who was asleep. Instead of waking him up or anything he just quietly said "Oh, I'm sorry," and walked off to do whatever it was that he did. "Don't sleep at your desk" is right in the union rules, come on.

Glad I don't work there anymore.

woke-up-before-your-alarm-stay-awake-dont-go-back-sleep-1280x600-1526941154898-300x141.jpg PIxabay

50. Awwwwwwkward.

Was out to lunch with three coworkers. Collectively, there are two males and two females. We're all attorneys.

One of the males is very into the other woman. She is also a hijab-wearing Muslim woman. The male coworker proceeds to get up from eating and starts to massage female coworker's head. Her hijab starts to fall off. We all tell him to stop. He explained that he was "getting the brain spiders off."

I was mortified. She was too. So was the other male. But, he continued working there.

Image by

49. Not everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt.

I worked from home at my last job and my coworker would sometimes just not log in until like 11 am and would just completely skip meetings that she was supposed to run. One time she missed a meeting with our boss and my boss just goes, “Well I bet she was up late working so is coming in late.”

employee-facial-expression-furnitures-1181649-300x200.jpg Pixabay

48. What a funny story.

I work with a guy who claims to be a well-paid, well-traveled comedian. Problem is he is not funny, never performed in our state, he claims to be famous in Arizona and California. He walks with a club foot and claims to be a former marine. We hired numerous veterans and he avoids them so he doesn't get caught in the lie everyone already knows about.

Image by

47. It's a crisis.

I work in the healthcare field. Had one coworker who never disposed of his narcotics properly with a witness (he would just have them signed out solo and say "oh yeah, [patient] didn't want them so I disposed of it" with zero verification) and had a LOT of liquid narcotics whose counts suddenly went mysteriously off after he'd been on shift. Somehow he did not get fired or even investigated. He wound up quitting after just a few months, good riddance.

Pexels

46. Totally trashed.

Had 8 servers delivered very late one day and left outside the data center. Everything was in boxes on a pallet.

Janitor thinks it’s trash, takes all of them to the trash compactor and crushes them. Each box weighed 80+ lbs. they weren’t ours but a company we contracted with.

We had to buy all new servers (for hundreds of thousands of dollars) and the guy didn’t even get a write up. He had a family member on the board.

Image by

45. This is why nepotism should be outlawed.

My boss forged my name on a number of documents, because she didn't have the required certifications to sign the documents herself and I had refused to sign them. I know this, because after things went horribly south they tried to claim I had been the one to screw up, and showed me my/her signature. She got promoted again instead of fired, that way I didn't have to quit. You will never guess whose mother owned the company.

Pixabay

44. We're not worthy.

My grandfather was a computer technician at my dad's school when he was growing up, the man had no experience with computers since they were still kinda the new thing. This madlad interviews, gets the job by spouting out buzzwords and at the end of the interview is like, "Hey I'm a bit unfamiliar with this particular system, could I have the manual to look over before I start?" They're like, "Yeah whatever."

Guy aggressively reads this manual until he is an expert and knows everything about this computer. He held the job for years.

computer-keyboard-contemporary-electronics-257881-300x200.jpg Pexels

43. The fall guy.

A guy I'll call Jack drove an oversized company vehicle into a garage too short for it. Peeled back the roof like a sardine can. He'd driven this vehicle before. He even parked it beside the other oversized company vehicles right outside the parking garage.

Jack just got transferred to another department. When he goofed up something in the new department, he got transferred again. He never got fired, yet had no connections or any sort of protected status.

I'm guessing the company kept Jack around because they needed his stupidity for write-offs when he destroyed things.

Pixabay

42. They're just in it for the wheatgrass.

I work at a Jamba Juice. A lot of my coworkers are highschool girls. A number of them will have friends come into the store and they'll go out to the front of the store and chat for sometimes hours. I can't believe none of them have been fired. They're just fooling around with friends and getting paid for it. Not only are they not working, but it looks really bad when customers come in and they aren't working and are in the front of the store not behind the counter.

blaspheme_blonde_chatting_communication_friends_friendship_funny_girls-9138-1551766743949-300x236.jpg Flickr

41. Someone please turn this into a sitcom.

There was this guy, Habib, who worked at Spirit Halloween the year I worked there, and he was sort of a legend to me, because I somehow worked the entire season and only saw him on my last day. He would do these unfathomably stupid things that made a ton more work for everyone else, and at first it ticked me off, but I came to realize it was sort of just who he was or it was how he worked, and the stories really grew on me. Things like: our manager gave him a huge carton of wigs to put away, and rather than putting them in the wig section, he spread them throughout the entire store, which was considerably more work. When confronted, he denied he'd done this, then asked how the manager could know it was him.

Maybe you'd have to be in that working environment to know why things like this were so funny. We had some of the absolute weirdest people working there, and the customers were always completely normal and understanding. The manager HATED kids, and strongly disliked Halloween, so she was always pretty grumpy.

Image by

40. Managers are supposed to inspire.

I'm leaving the job partially for this reason. My manager speaks to all the employees like they are stupid, and despite multiple HR reports she still works here. Talks down to people and belittles them. Makes decisions and tells people to do things just to throw her weight around. And rather than letting people take sick days she makes them take it as personal days. Also, when people try to call out when they are legitimately sick she will try to make them feel bad so they won't call out and guilt trip them. And if someone actually calls out she would treat them like garbage the day after as payment for calling out sick, like how dare you get sick.

Pixabay

39. There's no defense for that.

I worked with HR in a defense lab. I was waiting in one of the HR boss's office to give him some reports when he saw me looking at this big box full of batch printer paper (this is the green and white lined paper from the ancient days). He says "That is a log of all the pornographic usenet sites this guy has been visiting from our network after being told to stop doing it." It must've been a foot thick. He was still working there, hadn't even been cited.

hands_old_typing_laptop_internet_working_writer_old_person-770100-1550557068459-300x200.jpg Pixabay

38. Grocery bagger bags himself.

There is a guy I know with disabilities (family member of a friend) that was placed in a grocery store by one of those agencies that helps people with disabilities get jobs, as a bagger. He had a very poor sense of boundaries. He would even tell people stuff he shouldn't say out loud, he knew it was wrong, but he couldn't help himself. For example, he had to wear diapers, and he told me on numerous occasions that he was using them as we spoke. He did something at the store which caused him to get fired and his advocate was able to use the ADA to get him back employed, so they moved him to another location (same chain) more problems, and to yet a third location before the corporation had to cut ties with him completely. He can't even step foot onto any of their property anymore I still see him from time to time standing in the parking lot outside of the store talking about going in there and fighting the manager and how much he hates the people working there.

Pixabay

37. All bark, no bite.

At my old job, whenever my 2nd assistant manager would get upset with an employee, which was fairly often, he'd talk a lot of guff about that employee to other workers and managers and say things like "I'm gonna punch his face in." He never did. He was all talk, but a person of his position saying the things he did about people, it was amazing he didn't get fired.

Image by

36. Time is just a construct.

We had a guy who would roll the electronic time clock forward to the time he was supposed to get out, then roll it back to the real time and leave. He got caught three times before they bought a time clock that auto-set the time. He was finally fired for punching in another employee. Real piece of work.

Image by

35. Workplace death wish.

The car dealership I worked at had an automated garage door that opened REALLY fast and closed REALLY fast, because the shop had AC and heat so they didn’t want to waste either.

Two mechanics go up to the door. One of them stands under the door and proceeds to instruct the other one to push the manual override close button so that it would close on his head. He wanted to see what it would feel like. He ended up breaking the motor and costing the shop $15,000 plus whatever his medical bills he may have procured (I’m not really sure). Not fired.

Image by Lisa Johnson from Pixabay

34. Rehabilitation isn't over.

This guy at the Dairy Queen I worked at did all sorts of crazy stuff. He pulled my hair then screamed at me, he pushed an underaged kid with a lot of force, he called a 15 year old girl a "nice piece". This dude was 34. He threatened to kill his ex's dogs as well. This guy came to us from Illinois because he started dating one of the managers at my location. He had been through the prison system for the last decade or so. Highlights are assault, arson on a car, and arson on a home. After he finally left, he would keep calling the store and hang up if anyone other than his ex answered the phone. He would come in and just stare at everyone that worked there. It got so bad that the GM started carrying a gun to work. I would watch him through the security cameras and he would nonchalantly knock things off of counters and stuff. Just to make someone else clean up his messes like it was nothing. He was particularly creepy towards little boys that were with their mothers: he would compliment the boy's moms to the kids and tell them that they needed to protect her. All in all, he was a total nut.

Image by Vitabello from Pixabay

33. Shopping is work.

My old boss would "work remotely." Office mates regularly told me that she was seen out shopping or at a restaurant. She's also six months overdue on implementing a new system.

She's great at leadership and a big picture of the direction of the department. She's personable and super intelligent and driven. Unfortunately, with the new system six months behind, and many people at the office believing she's out shopping when she said, for example, she had to take a family member to the doctor due to a possible heart attack but will be working remotely and be available, those things may not matter. (Me? I think she took the relative to the doctor and then took herself out for retail therapy.)

I don't see her absence from the office as a big deal. It's kind of annoying not being able to reach her immediately when I need something but she gets back to me eventually. Our direct report thinks it's a big deal, though.

Still hasn't been fired. She also survived the last round of layoffs.

Pixabay

32. Five stars.

I used to work in a bar. One of the waiters, who was wearing an apron, would pull his junk out of his zipper and walk around lifting his apron to anyone and everyone that worked there. The customers never knew his balls were flapping in the breeze as he took their order.

flikr

31. It's a stressful job.

Had a guy in our collections department show up wasted and barefoot at a customer's apartment at 3am, screaming and beating on the guy's door. Dude's payment for the month was comped, but the employee didn't get so much as a write up.

Image by

30. It's called blue collar art.

I work in the office of a manufacturing plant. One of the employees took spray paint and painted large male members on a few of our products before shipping it out. We caught it at the warehouse. The guy was given a few days suspension. We joke that if you ever want a day off, just draw junk.

Image by

29. Every office has a drama queen.

A coworker of mine broke up two marriages back to back, one had kids. Kept hooking up with the first guy even after he was dating someone else at the company... and even after she wooed the second guy away from his wife/ mother of his three kids. Constantly talked badly about anyone that had gotten anything she felt she had deserved instead. She spread vicious and hateful rumors because she was mad about being passed up for promotion. Habitually and loudly overshared her private business. Always loud and aggressive while blaming her unprofessionalism on her ethnicity (I'm x that's just how we are!) Flagrantly abused the "honor code" clock in/out policy and after running through all her PTO AND her FMLA would continue to miss work/ go home early with zero consequences. Disregarded company policy regarding smoke breaks (non smoking campus, plus we weren't authorized breaks since we had an hour lunch per 8 hour shift.) She was such a well-known problem that managers would literally refuse to take her onto their teams, but for some reason she was untouchable.

Pixabay

28. Most people's dream job.

My wife had a sales guy where she works that was like 400 lbs and would frequently just be asleep. He also never made a sale. And he stunk and would do things like order an entire pizza and eat it very loudly in his office. After his first week or so, he started wearing sweatpants every day. Eventually, he was given the option of working from home for commission only, which was way of saying "you're not fired, but you're not getting paid". He cried and left and was never heard from again.

Pixabay

27. It's a skill.

My uncle used to run a few of the local Wendy's. The girl working the register would openly steal out of it. Not just on camera, not just in front of other employees, but in front of the manager. She never got fired. Why? She was the only one skilled enough to run the register.

Image by Charles Thompson from Pixabay

26. Totally understandable.

I worked at Applebees and this one server had decided she had had enough. She walked out in the middle of her shift, while she still had tables. Showed up the next day like nothing happened, and nothing did happen. She didn't get fired. She didn't get written up. She didn't get warned. She left everyone, including customers, high and dry as to where she was.

I eventually grew to get along very well with her. The gall of that blew my mind though.

Pixabay

25. He got a bad reception.

I had a store manager at a Sprint kiosk I worked at take sales that were in our names and put them in his name to get the commission for them. I still have no clue how many of mine he took. Best part is he got fired for it, and I became store manager there; then later on he somehow got his job back and came to MY store for training. Then, he started doing it AGAIN to MY employees. All they did was transfer him.

Pexels

24. A high price for a good sammie.

I worked in a full grocery store deli, bakery, meat/seafood and whatnot. So this person goes around to all these departments and makes these crazy huge sandwiches for everyone working nights. I'm talking the works; huge french bread, top of the line deli cuts, coleslaw, dressing, you name it. They tell everyone that they paid for everything and that it's their treat, and does this multiple different times. Now originally I found it very odd because not only was I a cashier and could pretty much cost build the sandwich (30-60 bucks) but I never saw him go through a cashier line. Well turns out they never paid for anything the 5-10 times they did this. What is worse everyone that ate was held responsible, but they never ate any of it themselves. They got a LOT of people fired and I'm talking old workers who were on really good grocery store contracts, wages were capped, health insurance, PTO I mean GOOD jobs for where I lived.

Image by peperompe from Pixabay

23. Double standards.

I worked at a thrift store warehouse processing donations. A girl who had a boyfriend would make out with this dude behind racks during working hours and on breaks they'd get together in her car in the parking lot. Lots of blatant smoking, stealing, and inappropriate talk about what her and her boyfriend did while at work. Whereas one of my coworkers who was a lesbian got fired for "inappropriate conversations" for just talking about being gay.

Image by

22. Negligence or the opening of a heist movie?

I work retail. There's a story in my company that someone at a different location than the one I work at once completely and utterly failed to close properly. They left the safe open, the alarm off, and the door unlocked. Guess what? All of the cash in the safe was gone the next morning. No one was fired.

Image by

21. Taking advantage of no oversight.

While working at an utilities brokerage as a sales rep/call centre agent I worked with this girl whose work for the day was to literally just email our boss at the end of the day to let him know what I had done that day.

Our boss lived and worked in Thailand so he wasn't exactly able to oversee us with complete accuracy but we were supposed to email in at the end of the day with a report of what we had done and she asked me if she could write up the day for the two of us which I thought was a little odd but guessed she was just trying to be nice.

Eventually she stopped telling him it was me doing the work and I lost my job because she took all the credit. Fortunately, I hated that job.

desk_glasses_laptop_microsoft_notebook_pc_person_typing-936770-1548400213644-300x200.jpg Pixabay

20. Just get management to like you.

This office manager we had, the boss that hired him obviously had a huge lady boner for him. He was an insecure moron. Always tried to prove to people he knew stuff about the company that there was literally no way for him to know. Had no concept of earning expertise and respect. He was working 4-5 hours a day, and claiming 8. The front desk started clocking him. Told accounting, he had to use up all his sick/vacation time. Not fired. He started sneaking out different ways.

By the time he left all the bosses liked him, because he knew how to brownnose all the right people. He left because he wanted to be a home inspector, and he's still on roster as helping with website work.

Pixabay

19. Sounds like she's going to be a client soon.

This one employee continuously lies, forges doctors notes, sleeps, runs work errands for an unreasonable amount of time, is never on time, a few times has called the office screaming in hysterics saying she is having a panic attack and cannot come in today, takes personal calls and continues a non important conversation for an extended time, is constantly on her phone using social media, texting, IG, facebook, whatever not work related, needs constant directions/reminders on what to do during the day, doesn’t relay phone message to the appropriate person, client calls, she writes it down, hangs up and that’s it. No voicemail no message given. Goes through training then 1 month later it’s like she never went to training at all, no memory, nothing. Like groundhogs day back to asking 1000 questions like she hasn’t been told 1000 times what to do or how to do it. Abused any office privileges we had because now they have all been taken away because of her. Unreliable, unpredictable, crazy, sociopath... this is all at a top 3 law firm.

Image by

18. Probably had tenure.

My housemaster at the boarding school where I used to work had a notoriously short fuse and an incredibly inappropriate choice of words. I heard him refer to an 18 year old student as a retard, and it took three of the kid's friends to hold him back from obliterating the housemaster's face; not only was nothing done about this despite a complaint being made, but this man is now deputy headmaster of the entire school.

Image by Alexas_Fotos from Pixabay

17. Typical day in the kitchen.

Worked in a restaurant. Cook came in after his shift after he'd been out on a bender. He was belligerent and upset for no clear reason. He grabbed a 10" serrated bread knife from the counter and was swinging it around. Eventually he picked someone specific to go after and started to move towards him and passed me. One of the guys was moving in from behind to grab him so myself and another guy grabbed his knife arm and pinned it to the counter at the same time that the dude directly behind him put him in a headlock. We took the knife and threw him towards the door and told him to get out.

No one called the cops. I called the owner. He was not fired and worked his shift the next day.

Image by

16. Sounds about right.

Back when I was in grad school there were a lot of older faculty who really hadn't done anything for years--no research, no grad students, maybe taught one very specialized class. They came in to the department whenever, sat around and drank coffee and chitchatted, maybe typed a bit on the computer, and went home. They also had the largest offices. They couldn't be fired nor forced to retire. Meanwhile, all the new faculty were running themselves ragged trying to get tenured.

Image by

15. Anything for a bonus.

I was a sales manager, salaried with our yearly bonus mainly based on making budget. Another manager whose district was south of mine was about 25K short of making his numbers for the year, so he places an order for a large corporate customer (several pallets worth of products weighing well over a ton) and has it shipped to a storage facility, all without the customer knowing let alone agreeing to it. After the new year he has it returned for credit, but not before the customer is invoiced and raises a stink over it, yet he keeps his job, makes his number and gets his bonus. All because he kept his nose shoved so far up the regional managers butt who was a colossal jerk himself. So glad I’m no longer with that mess of an outfit.

Photo by energepic.com from Pexels

14. Someone deserved a kick.

My boss told a pregnant co-worker after she denied his advances (he was married) that he was going to do what "the sperm donor" should have done and kick her in the stomach.

Multiple witnesses attested to him saying this, including me. We reported it, nothing happened to him. Come to find out it was because they were closing the business anyways so they couldn't be bothered.

Image by

13. Time's up.

In the wake of the whole #metoo movement, this dude I work with got caught harassing a teenage girl that worked for one of our huge clients.

Basically he went to this place after hours, got another employee to give him her personal cell and was trying to slip in the DM's. Did I mention he's like 50?

We almost lost the account but they didn't fire him. He isn't allowed to step foot in that place anymore though.

Pexels

12. Feeling dizzy.

A guy in our office had vertigo and fell over at work. He claimed worker's comp and ended up getting paid while sipping mimosas on yachts and at cafés for about a year.

He came back to work and would end up missing for more than half the day. If he was at his desk, he was always on his phone. He also nominated himself as an outstanding employee and got awarded the most outstanding employee of the month. As an outstanding employee, you get a $100 Visa gift card as well.

That guy really knew how to game the system, I guess.

Photo by Ruthson Zimmerman on Unsplash

11. Eating into our price cuts.

I know a dude who got hired at a Walmart but was never given an actual position because the dude that hired him left, but he was put on the pay roll, so he just walked around the store holding a clipboard, helping people out for a few minutes, then saying he had to go back to his department, which didn't exist. And he just did that day in day out, getting paid to walk around holding a clipboard, for a year or so until people worked it out.

Image by

10. Too much time off.

I had this manager who would dip out every single Saturday we worked together. He would open and I closed. Night time (restaurant so dinner rush) got crazy but he would always jet out around 3pm. Noticed that at the end of the week on payroll he spent a ton of time in the office.

Turns out he was editing all his time punch cards.

The district manager got wind of it and asked me if he left early some days. I said yes and he showed me that the punches were edited. He said he would have a word with him. But it still went on. Eventually I told my district managers boss, regional. She didn't want to hear it. I ended up quitting after they started asking me if I was stealing.

Because time theft isn't stealing I guess...

writing_pen_man_boy_male_ink_paper_pencils-655321-1550552667532-300x200.jpg Pixabay

9. Ruining it for everybody.

When I worked at Gamestop the district manager would decide how many hours each store got and this included the hours the store manager would get since they were the only full timers. One time the district manager didn't allocate hours for my boss, just enough to cover the part timers, every attempt to contact her was pointless and he went over her head to corporate and demanded to know what was up, after the call she miraculously got into contact with him and all but told him he was fired without reason. My boss threatened a lawsuit over wrongful termination and the way she fired him, so corporate offered him 3 months pay and benefits if he'd just leave which he took and was quickly replaced with the chillest boss I've ever had but it still sucked since he was also a cool boss. The woman was never fired or even reprimanded and over the next year I learned just how much corporate was going to protect her when everyone working under her filed a complaint with human resources and we were told to shove it. She demoted my new manager, forced the assistant manager to a new store much further from where he lived and as a result the rest of us at the store I worked at quit at the same time before she could bring in her hand picked managers. To my knowledge she still runs the show and the only happiness I can take from it is that she was obviously miserable in her position.

Photo by Moose Photos from Pexels

8. Poisoning the water cooler.

In my previous job I had a terrible boss. She micromanaged everything, even though she was part time. She was very snippy and had an attitude when she was in a bad mood. She was very unprofessional with many people we hired and she became like that with me eventually. Our department was the only department that had so many turnovers. It was a joke between other managers. She had temper tantrums and loud arguments with heads of other departments.... you get the picture. I ended up leaving the company because her attitude and behaviour was literally driving me insane. At one point I spoke to her boss, a partner in the company, regarding her behaviour and he said that my boss was amazing because she strives for excellence... as if she was the only one doing that.

I'm wrapping up reading a book written by a former HR person from a very large organization and she talks about why terrible people are kept on board, even though they're creating a lot of drama/problems/hassle in and out of the department - it's usually because they share the same values as the partners/president. Thinking about it now, I think the reason why she is kept on board and why she got promoted was because she thinks on her feet very quickly. I understand the importance of this trait, I really do, but she's poisoning the company.

Image by Robin Higgins from Pixabay

7. Landed a government job.

My entire office tracked the schedule of one of our developers. Since I built our timesheet app I started a second copy just for his times which anyone could update. We had months of data showing when he clocked in but was not actually in the office. He gets a stern talking to.

Within a month he was back at it. He comes in one day complaining about losing his car keys while fishing. Tells the story to our manager and just about anyone who will listen. Check the timesheet for that day and he has marked himself as there for a full day plus extra for flex time. This time he gets a slap on the wrist which was supposedly a note in his file.

The icing on the cake was that when he actually came into the office he didn't work anyway. He played online poker mostly. And he smelled terrible.

Considering that this was a governmentt job in the UK we got some 50+ days off per year (counting bank holidays) plus we could bank time and take 4 flex days per month. So he would fake his timesheet and bank the flex time and still not use any of his PTO. I don't think he ever worked a full week.

He worked there long after I quit. Idling by and getting paid out of peoples taxes.

Image by

6. Blame it on the new guy.

At a factory I started working at someone on a far more advanced piece of machinery asked me to take their place since my team's machine was down and he was needed elsewhere. Being new, I say "sure thing!" I arrive at this machine, me 18 years old, and everyone on the line is about the size of a dumpster truck. I proceed to bust my butt lifting 50 pound stacks of material for 12 hours. At the end of my shift I felt miserable, and I was in so much pain I called in sick the next morning. I even explained I was on a machine I wasn't trained for and it must've been too much.

MONTHS later, I get fired on the spot, a week before Christmas. The reason? I had accumulated 2 missed days. The other one being when I got sick 4 hours into a shift and went home. Here's the kicker. I ended up working on the other machine numerous times, a machine that I later learned people were being paid 4$ an hour more to work on. The guy whose place I took because he was "needed elsewhere"? I later learned every time he did this, it was so he could go sleep for several hours in a dumpster for cardboard. He, of course, kept his job.

Image by

5. Not threatening at all.

I used to work at a Federal research lab. We had a guy who used to come to work and be ticked off about whatever. He'd get mad the printer wasn't working. He'd be mad someone didn't water the research plots right. He'd be mad about politics, you name it.

He used to say, and pantomime with his finger, that he was going to shoot stuff or people that were bugging him. That's a bit weird by itself, but the bigger issue was he would also routinely drive to work with a loaded .45 on the front passenger's seat of his car. He'd tell people he had his gun in his car and he was going to get it one of these days when he'd had enough.

It's was actually illegal to bring a firearm onto the premises (at least at our lab it was) and I reported it to our HR person after a few times. I was starting to get worried he might actually do it. Turns out as I'm talking to the HR person, I'm the third person to complain about his bringing a weapon to work and threatening to shoot people in the last few months.

Nothing ever happened, other than my boss and I actually made up an escape plan for when Jerry went nuts and started shooting up the place.

Image by

4. You've got to admire him.

I've had all kinds of jobs, but have worked primarily as a coder for the last 25ish years.

I have seen SOOOO much nonsense on the job. Early in my career, I was working at a HUGE corporation on campus. This was in the late 90s. Anyway this dude sat in the cube across from me. His name was "James", but he called himself "WebDawg".

WebDawg knew all the right words; "SQL Server", "Java Servlet", "CICS System". But unfortunately that was where his knowledge ended. He didn't know how to use any of these technologies, despite being a "Senior Programmer."

WebDawg would roll in at around 11ish usually. He'd try to slink in quietly, but his silence was always deafening if you know what I mean. He'd go to lunch (off campus of course) at 12, be back by 2 and leave at 3. They did actually *try* to get him some work a few times, but he never delivered and always managed to find excuses and pass the work to someone else.

This continued for.... Way too long. And eventually (like after a couple of years) it caught up with him and they let him go. Thank God. Now I don't have to pick up the slack for him anymore with no thanks while he 'works' his 2 hour days.

Fast Forward (a phrase which surely dates me) a few months... Like maybe 3 or 4. We're migrating the entire company backend to Java. We need tons and tons of contractors to help us rearchitect the entire backend all the way to the mainframe. And we only hire the *best* consultants. Like Big 3 consulting firms. Won't name names.

And there he was... His dreadlocks rakishly held back by an oversize scrunchy, his backpack slung over one shoulder, his cargo pants and Doc Martins letting all of us know just what a cool dude he was. Yep. WebDawg was working with one of the shmansiest consulting firms in the country.

In a way I kind of idolize him. I mean, how big do your balls have to be to walk right back into the company you just got fired from a few months earlier and act like nothing ever happened? Chutzpah. WebDawg at least has that much going for him.

Sometimes I imagine where he's at today. Probably a CTO somewhere.

Image by

3. Girls don't know how to glue.

I used to work in instrument manufacturing. There were these tiny heater parts that needed to be glued together. Well, one of the employees, the sweetest lady, was new to that particular station that involved the heater part. All of her heaters kept leaking. Nobody knew why. They assumed that it was faulty parts. I had worked at that station before her and I came over to take a look. She was gluing the parts wrong. She was placing the heavier part on the bottom and the lighter part in top. To get a good seal, you obviously place the heavy part on top when you lay it to dry. Well, they got the engineers over to take a look. They told me I was wrong because that’s not in the instruction booklet. I told them I had been building these for months and never had any problems and that they might want to consider changing it in the manual because it seems to be common sense. They continued to tell me I was wrong because god forbid they take the advice of a young woman. This one engineer was a sexist jerk and he was in charge of this problem. They continued to trash thousands of dollars worth of perfectly good parts and this guy continued to blame the manufacturer of the parts. Sometimes I would work weekends with my boss. I asked him if I could please just work on one batch to prove I was right. He let me and guess what? No leaking! My boss tells the higher ups and the instructions are changed. I get zero acknowledgement in solving the case. Since thousands of dollars in product have been wasted, someone needs to take a hit. And that someone was the kind little older woman who had only been doing what the engineer told her to do. The person who should have been fired was that jerk who didn’t want to listen to me.

Image by

2. These people are saving your life.

One of the last places I worked at was a hospital and one of my duties was to put together Code Boxes. So a code box is basically a kit that a nurse, doctor, or whatever grabs if a patient is 'coding,' like if they stop breathing and they need a breathing tube type of thing. Well code boxes require two signatures before they can be sealed up and delivered. One signature is the person putting the kit together that basically says yeah all the parts are there, everything is clean, and nothing will expire anytime soon. The second signature is for the person who signs off saying they checked all the same stuff after the kit was assembled.

There was this one employee who everyone HATED because this employee was a nazi when it came to rules, would raise trouble with the supervisor who was a complete pushover and she (who had the same job title as me) would get him to make new rules, you know that type of nonsense. This employee for weeks assembled code boxes signed their name and then forged my signature as the person who signed off saying it was good to go. I went to the boss and this employee who has never not once apologized for one thing in her life was escorted by the boss and made to say, "I'm sorry you were offended when I forged your signature and it wont happen again."
I told my boss I needed to talk to him in private RIGHT NOW and said that's not an apology, she ain't sorry. If a patient were to get sick because that stuff in the kit wasnt clean or had expired, I WOULD BE THE ONE TO GET SUED AND LOSE MY JOB. His reply was the best, "Well, what exactly do you want from her? She said she won't do it again."

The employee never did get fired, in fact some months later they got a promotion in that department, and about a year after that left for our competitor which meant a pay raise.

I'm glad I don't work there anymore.

Image by

1. The most epic ghosting story of all time.

We hired this woman to my team. Her job was to do exactly what I did. We work from home, but we have constant conference calls and a TON of work to do. It's simply not possible to slack off without being noticed.

I trained her and she shadowed me for a couple of months. She should have been ready to go off on her own, but she kept asking the same questions again and again. It's like she wasn't even sort of listening to anything we said. Which was super annoying...but then...

About 3 months in, she disappeared. Like stopped logging into calls, stopped logging into Skype, stopped everything. We emailed, texted, and called for awhile, until she finally responded that she had been in the hospital with a hernia. Now my mother had hernia surgery in her 70's and was home within a few hours. So...red flag. We were also stunned and deeply offended that she never, ever bothered to call, text, email, ANYTHING to say she'd be out. Never in my 20 year career have I seen anything like it. In my personal opinion, I thought she should have been fired right then and there.

BUT, our boss didn't want to make a big deal out of it - she didn't want to tell the big boss for some reason. I'm still baffled by that, but that meant neither the powers that be nor HR had any idea it had even happened. So eventually, after having fallen off the planet for about 10 days, this new hire finally came back. Both our boss and I counseled her A LOT about communication. Things happen, we get it. Just TALK to us. Let us know what's going on. Benefit of the doubt, right?

Yeah, a little over a month later, she did it again. At first I noticed she wasn't joining calls or logging into Skype and she kept saying she was having connection issues. Fine. Once again, TELL US. And for god's sake, call tech support. But then she was offline for an entire week, so we tried hunting her down again. Nothing. No response, no communication, nothing.

This time, the issue was escalated and HR got involved. After a total of two weeks, she apparently told HR she was having medical issues. She was counseled that she had to log on and fill out her time sheets to reflect she was out of office for ALL the time she was gone. She was given a deadline of a week to do this. This never happened, and she was STILL employed. Please note, at this point she had still not spoken a word to either myself or our boss.

So now we're at three weeks of radio silence and HR contacts our boss to say new hire had reached out to say she's filing short-term disability. Fine, whatever. We wait. And wait. And obviously, she never filed. So FINALLY, a month after disappearing for the SECOND time with zero communication, she was terminated.

The amount of work I had to pick up thanks to her disappearing act was madness. I'm talking upwards of 80 hours a week for more than a month. I am still bitter about it.

Pixabay