A young woman has revealed how she was unexpectedly fired from her corporate, six-figure job after making a "20-second mistake" during an early morning meeting.
The 24-year-old, a woman from the US named Michelle, had been in a virtual meeting with her colleagues one morning in August when she decided to make herself a coffee. Leaving the meeting on in the background, she captured a seemingly innocuous video of herself accidentally spilling the coffee in her kitchen and decided to upload the humorous clip to TikTok.
However, Michelle hadn't realised that her colleagues' voices were audible in the clip, allowing viewers of the video to hear potentially confidential information regarding her workplace or the contents of the meeting.
Just 24 hours after she uploaded the video, Michelle said a meeting was scheduled between her, human resources and her chief product officer, where she was told she was being "immediately dismissed" for "gross negligence".
In a now-viral video documenting the saga, Michelle claimed she was fired from her "six-figure remote tech job" because of the one seemingly innocent TikTok.
"They canned me... it was all because of a TikTok. I took a quick snippet of the coffee everywhere, I turned around my face and [screamed], 'F***'. I hit 'stop recording' and I uploaded it," she recounted.
"I did not use my big giant brain to think about the fact that, in the background of that video, you can hear my chief product officer talking... because I was in a meeting."
Elaborating on the story, Michelle claimed she had been in a weekly team meeting, which had begun at 4:30am.
"They were having a conversation that had absolutely nothing to do with me so I went off camera, took the 20-second video and hit upload… I didn't realise when I uploaded the video that in the background of my video, you can actually hear my work meeting going on. And I did not think anything of it until the next day," she continued.
During the meeting the following day, Michelle claimed that she was immediately dismissed after her superiors were sent the video in question and alerted to the possible breach of confidential information - but she argued the content of the meeting was far from classified.
"They weren't talking about anything super confidential. You can honestly barely hear them in the background, but alas, they found it to be a fireable offence and so they canned me.
"I have nothing else to do but accept it, I f***ed up. It was an oversight, I would 100 percent accept that… I can't do anything about it."
Michelle added that she took the video down from her profile upon the company's request, noting it had only been viewed 2500 times.
In another follow-up video, Michelle said she'd enjoyed working for the company and had been given a pay rise just two weeks earlier.
Despite losing her cushy job after eight months of employment, Michelle said there was a silver lining - with the sudden termination prompting her to follow her dream of starting her own business.
"So of course, I thought, 'What would any college dropout who got fired from their job do next?'" she said. "I'm going to start my own company.
"Someone said to me, 'You should go full time and launch this company', and I was like, 'No, I have a sweet gig'... if that isn't a sign from the universe, I don't know what is."
