15 HR Managers Share Their Wildest Ever Employee Firing
Getting fired is usually pretty straightforward. Maybe someone keeps showing up late, misses too many deadlines, or simply isn’t a good fit for the job. Then there are the employees who make HR departments earn every penny of their salaries. In a recent AskReddit thread, managers and workers shared some of the strangest firings they had ever witnessed, and several sound more like sitcom plots than workplace incidents. We’re talking about a salesperson throwing a customer’s keys onto a roof, an employee getting caught by his own mouse jiggler, and someone losing a job over three pieces of chocolate. Others prove that getting caught is sometimes less embarrassing than the explanation that follows. Here are 15 of the wildest employee firing stories Reddit had to offer.
He kept taking the company news van to a strip club
A television station employee apparently had a habit that was difficult for his coworkers to miss. According to one Redditor, the news photographer repeatedly took one of the station’s vans to a local strip club. The problem was that the vehicle had the station’s logo displayed prominently on the side, making his choice of parking spot considerably less private.
He was secretly collecting customers’ Subway points
One former Subway manager discovered something strange when the owner noticed that an unusual number of orders were being edited. A staff member was apparently changing transactions after the manager left, then rerunning them to collect the Subway rewards points. Another employee tried deleting orders from the system and pocketing the cash, apparently forgetting that deleted transactions were still logged.
A fire drill turned into a firing drill
Most employees probably expect a fire drill to end with everyone heading back to their desks. At one workplace, that wasn’t quite what happened. A Redditor recalled a drill in which certain employees were reportedly informed during the evacuation that they had been let go. When everyone else returned to the building, those workers simply weren’t coming back with them.
She basically confirmed her own firing
A senior operations manager recalled handling the appeal of an employee who had been fired following serious complaints about her behavior toward a coworker. When he called to discuss the allegations, she didn’t exactly mount a vigorous defense. Instead, she openly acknowledged what she had done. The termination stood, but she still had one question: Could she reapply the following week?
He was caught downloading the company server
One employee probably wasn’t expecting anyone else at the office over the weekend. Unfortunately for him, a manager happened to stop by after forgetting something. The manager discovered the employee transferring the contents of the company’s server onto personal hard drives. According to the Redditor who shared the story, he was promptly fired, with possible legal action discussed afterward.
He wouldn’t stop farting on his coworkers
Some workplace rules shouldn’t need to be explained, but apparently this was one of them. A manager said an assistant manager repeatedly walked past employees and intentionally farted near them. Management warned him that the behavior constituted harassment and told him to stop. He didn’t, so the company eventually terminated him over it.
He threw a customer’s keys onto the roof
A salesperson apparently decided that the best way to stop a prospective buyer from leaving was to make leaving physically difficult. According to one Redditor, he threw the customer’s keys onto the roof of the building and later insisted he was making some kind of point about the product’s quality. Somehow, he’d already spent 20 years with the company.
He borrowed a hoodie and lost his job
A warehouse employee needed to work in a freezer but didn’t have a coat, so he grabbed a hoodie someone had left nearby. He wore it while working, then returned it to the exact same place. Unfortunately, its owner had already reported it missing. Security footage identified the temporary borrower, who was reportedly fired for theft about an hour later.
HR fired her after she finished firing everyone else
During a 2009 downturn, one HR employee spent three days helping lay off roughly 80 workers. By the final day, she was reportedly exhausted from the process. Her manager arrived and joined her for the final two terminations. Then came one last firing: hers. Another Redditor said essentially the same thing happened to him after he personally laid off 12 employees.
He didn’t even make it through his first day
One manager’s new hire interviewed well, but that version of him apparently disappeared before his first shift. The employee arrived roughly 20 to 30 minutes late, parked across from the workplace, and then casually stopped to smoke before going inside. His manager was watching the whole thing and fired him on the spot.
His mouse jiggler didn’t fool HR
Remote work inspired plenty of creative ways to look busy, but this employee’s strategy wasn’t especially convincing. An HR manager said the company discovered he was using a mouse jiggler after noticing that little work got done on his remote days. Presented with screenshots showing his computer sitting on the same screen for hours, he quickly went from denying everything to essentially admitting he’d been caught.
He left work while his manager was still watching
A manager visited one of her field employees, helped him with some technical problems, and eventually said goodbye. She hadn’t even left the parking lot when she watched him get into his car and drive away while still clocked in. Further investigation suggested he’d been leaving early whenever he thought his manager wasn’t around. This time, he didn’t even wait 10 minutes.
His business trips conveniently included the Iditarod
One sales employee kept booking trips to Alaska, even though his company didn’t have enough business there to justify so much travel. Eventually, management started asking questions. Customers reportedly didn’t even know he was their salesperson, while his trips conveniently allowed him to watch the start of the Iditarod and go fishing. The unusual travel schedule didn’t last much longer.
He kept stealing his coworkers’ lunches
A factory employee was only a few weeks into his job when he was called into HR. Security cameras had repeatedly captured him taking food from other employees’ lunchboxes in the workplace refrigerators. Even after being shown multiple clips, he continued insisting that he wasn’t the person in the footage. The company wasn’t persuaded and fired him.
She turned coupons into a $10,000 scheme
At one Kroger location, collected coupons were supposed to be bundled and sent away so the store could be reimbursed. Instead, a manager allegedly picked out coupons she wanted and used them at stores outside her district, sometimes walking away with hundreds of dollars in merchandise. The Redditor said the company eventually documented more than $10,000 in coupons and products. Her defense? They were “just coupons”.