Warning: This story contains strong language.
We all make mistakes at work: but on the spectrum of said mistakes, being late on a deadline isn't quite in the same league as getting drunk on a flight to a sales meeting and pressing your bare butt against the plane window.
According to Reddit (the epitome of a reliable source), that did actually happen: safe to say, the employee was fired by the vice president of the company, who happened to be on the same flight, and immediately sent home.
The coworker who saw this alleged incident unfold shared their story in the popular AskReddit forum last week, when user u/Quintowne posed the question: "What is the fastest way you've seen someone get fired?"
The responses are really something to behold: so to help you through your Thursday (or if you recently screwed up at work, make you feel somewhat better that you didn't screw up as spectacularly as these people), here are some of the best responses.
- "My first job was in a small grocery store and my boss asked a coworker to do the dishes in the bakery (baking pans, etc). She replied: 'I only do my own dishes, somebody else put these here so I'm not doing them. I'm serious. Fire me if you want, I won't do them'. Boss says 'Okay then, don't bother finishing your shift, goodbye!'"
- "First day on the job, they gave another coworker a wet-willy. Shit you not."
- "First day at work, hired by a temp agency. Me and one other guy, we put stuff in boxes and tape them shut, stack boxes on a pallet. He can't keep up, can barely use a tape gun and decides it's time for break. Goes to the lunch room and takes a lunch. It was the boss's lunch, he stole the guy's meal his wife prepared for him. Boss man came over 15 mins later and wants to know who ate his BBQ - sticky fingers and BBQ on his shirt, he denies it. I just look at him and the boss and said, 'Well, I hope it was good, man'."
- "Had a coworker explain to our supervisor how he found this great loophole for making extra money: if a customer had exact change, he'd just pocket the cash and cancel the order on the register."
- "I saw a coworker once make a "big boobs" gesture as our boss' wife walked past… with our boss walking right behind her. He was packing his shit within five minutes."
- "A colleague let a middle school kid drive the bus. Buh-bye!"
- "The guy responsible for opening the shop on Saturday morning went out and got blitzed on Friday night. We showed up to work to find his car in the lot but the doors locked. He didn't answer his phone. Had to call the owner in to get us inside. Guy was fast asleep, under his desk. He was gone before you could say 'hangover'."
- "First day at work for this new dude. We pick him up at 7am. He hops into the car and goes, 'Ahhhh, jeez… when are we finishing work today? I'm beat. Can you guys buy me a pack of cigarettes?' The boss stopped the car, and told him to get out. It was 7:03am."
- "Dude showed up to his first day after taking acid. Told the boss his acid kicked in."
- "New girl shows up. They run her through how to work the cash register on a few dummy orders. She takes a real order or two and then it gets slow. She asks to duck out for a minute to smoke and never came back. Register ended up being $100 short that day."
- "First day at work he took one look at his would-be boss and declared, 'I won't work under a woman'. So he was shown the door."
- "I worked at Subway very briefly during high school. After I'd been there long enough to know how everything worked, they hired this new guy. He was the same age as me at the time, about 17 or 18, but he had an extremely short temper. He was scheduled to work a five-hour shift on his first day. About three hours in, a customer requested more mayo on their sandwich. He drizzled more on, and they said they still wanted more. This dude's face turned bright red, and he said, 'Fine, how's THIS for MORE?!' Then he unscrewed the cap on the mayo bottle and just dumped all of it out onto the sandwich… He wrapped up the mayo-ridden sandwich, picked it up, and, not kidding, just chucked the sandwich full-force, like a football, into the parking lot. The customer was upset, understandably. The manager came out of her office to hear what all the commotion was about. She reviewed the camera footage and told him to leave on the spot. I never saw him again, and he was removed from the schedule and the team group chat the same day."
- "I worked in a restaurant, and when someone at a table wanted to return their Mai Tai, the server chugged it right in front of them and said, 'It tastes fine'."
- "He pooped on an office floor and just walked away like he had no clue he'd done it."
- "Within two weeks, a new hire was found sleeping in the middle of a fort of inventory he made. They walked him out immediately."
- "I was a manager for a cosmetics store at the mall. On my day off, I got a call from one of my long-time employees that our new hire had tried to fight a girl who came into our store because she was the ex-girlfriend of the new hire's fiancé. I had to come in on my day off, pregnant and starving because I hadn't had time to eat yet, to deal with this absolute middle school nonsense. When I got there, the new hire and her mom were just chilling by the register, as if fighting people while at work was a totally normal, everyday occurrence. The mom had the audacity to say to me, 'She didn't have any business coming in here!' I had to inform her that our store was open to the public, so she had every right to come in. Then, I had to fire the new hire. The wild thing was, she thought I was coming in to check on her - like I was there because I had her back!"
And of course, the one you've all been waiting for:
- "During an annual sales meeting, a colleague got trashed on the plane ride there and pressed his bare butt on the plane window as it taxied to the gate, hoping to moon some friends who had just landed nearby. A VP was on the plane. Dude was fired and immediately sent home (on the company dime). He never even left the airport."
Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
