Reddit user u/Quintowne posed the intriguing question: "What is the fastest way you've seen someone get fired?" Naturally, the thread filled with hundreds of stories that would make any HR rep clutch their pearls. Here are some of the wildest:
1. "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."
2. "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. The customer was understandably confused."
"He wrapped up the mayo-ridden sandwich, picked it up, went into the lobby, then out the front door, and, not kidding, just chucked the sandwich full-force, like a football, into the parking lot. The customer was upset, understandably. The hot-headed employee tried ignoring her afterwards. 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."
3. "A nepotism hire got fired within a week for continuously painting/graffiti-ing the bathroom with poop."
4. "I did the firing. I was the sous chef of a large reception hall, meaning I was serving food to hundreds and hundreds of guests. One party had a big seafood display — shrimp, oysters, crab legs, and vodka — all in a giant, decorative box of ice. When that portion of dinner service was finished, two new waiters were tasked with returning the big ice box and the leftovers to the kitchen and dish pit. They dumped the ice back into the ice machine. The CONTAMINATED ice. It even had some discarded shells. I saw it happen. I had to show them the door immediately and have a serious talk with their head waiter. They lasted two hours, tops. Those idiots could've killed someone. Imagine you have a severe shellfish allergy, and the ice in your glass of water is lethal."
5. "New person got access to the medical records system. Week two: They looked up our boss and bragged about it. They were walked out that week."
6. "Had a coworker explain to our supervisor how he found this great loophole for making extra money. The loophole: If a customer had exact change, he’d just pocket the cash and cancel the order on the register."
7. "First day at work, hired by a temp agency. Me and one other guy had to put stuff in boxes and tape them shut, then stack the boxes on a pallet. He couldn't keep up and could barely use the tape gun, so he decided it was time for break. He went to the lunch room and took someone's lunch. It was the boss's lunch. He stole the guy's meal that his wife had prepared for him. The boss man came over 15 minutes later and wanted to know who ate his BBQ. The guy had BBQ on his shirt and still denied it. I just looked at him and the boss and said, 'Well, I hope it was good, man...'"
8. "A colleague let a middle school kid drive the bus. Buh-bye!"
9. "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."
10. "During drop-off hours, our preschool receptionist decided she needed to have coffee ASAP. Instead of heading down to our staff room and making a pot, she decided to leave our whole school unlocked and left to go down to Biggby Coffee. That was a big no-no. She was fired as soon as she came back."
11. "I was quality assurance for a place that evaluated operations involving explosives. I was leaving soon, so my replacement was hired. I recommended against his hiring because I'd heard bad things, and he seemed shady, but they hired him anyway. So, on his first day, I was tasked with training him on the job. He was already highly qualified on explosives (more qualified than I was, in fact). Anyway, as we're evaluating a couple of guys working on the internals of a live AIM-120 missile, this clown's CELLPHONE goes off in his pocket. To even get into the bay we were in, you had to walk past about four signs that say to leave all electronic devices outside because even tiny amounts of EM emissions can set off the explosives, especially when the covers are removed/disassembled."
"So, I wrote up my replacement with a direct safety violation, and he didn't have a job by the time he got back to the office. Quality assurance's reputation was in the crapper for months. That idiot could have gotten five people killed, including himself."
12. "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.'"
13. "First day on the job, they gave another coworker a wet willy. Not kidding."
14. "A mate many years ago started a part-time job at Pizza Hut. The first customer he took a pizza out to asked for him to be sacked, and he was. To be fair to the customer, my mate had a string of cheese all the way from the pizza dish to his chin. He thought no one would notice one slice of pepperoni missing. He was wrong."
15. "Had a supervisor start selling Amway from his office. He hinted at favorable treatment for anyone who would buy. Reported him to HR, and when they asked if it was true, he pulled out a catalog and tried to sell them something. Fired on the spot."
16. "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, but I won’t do them.' Boss said: 'Okay then, don’t bother finishing your shift. Goodbye!'"
17. "I saw a coworker once make a 'big boobs' gesture as our boss's wife walked past...while our boss was walking right behind her. The guy was packing his stuff within five minutes."
18. "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. We had to call the owner in to get us inside. The guy was fast asleep under his desk. He was gone before you could say 'hangover.'"
19. "I was on a new team hired for corporate sales. They trained us as a group. We were given the task of creating a presentation with graphs and charts to show how we present to a group, then we'd be given pointers on how to improve. One guy showed up an hour late, waltzed in, and said he was tired from the drive in and needed a coffee before settling in. We were in suits and ties, and he was wearing a dress shirt with a huge eagle on the front and jeans. He came back a few minutes later, and when asked to present, he said he didn’t prepare anything, but he was happy to answer any questions they may have had about presentations. We all looked at each other in disbelief. He was fired on the spot by the manager. I heard that they asked him to return his laptop, and he stiffed them for months before they sent a repo man to his door to pick it up."
20. "I worked at a grocery store a few years ago. A new guy was hired, and on the second day on the job, he was caught stealing food. He would grab items off the shelves, walk to the break room, and eat them."
21. "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, regardless of her motives."
"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! I actually hate that I missed the fight because my long-time employee said she threw the weakest, saddest, little punch."
22. "I work for a large big box store. We brought on a new hire last week. Three days into the work week, we noticed either he didn’t have a radio, or he just didn’t know how to operate it. It turned out he was arriving to clock in, leaving until lunch, clocking out and leaving again, returning to satisfy the clock again, leaving, and then returning yet again to clock out for the day. He did this for three days. A new hire. His lead was also given a meeting, as they weren’t doing due diligence and trying to find him."
23. "Within two weeks, a new hire was found sleeping in the middle of a fort of inventory he made. They walked him out immediately."
24. "He pooped on an office floor and just walked away like he had no clue he'd done it."
25. Finally: "Annual promotion season. An HR rep at my previous employer was sending her boss the salary/raise calculations for everyone in our office. In sending, she accidentally CC’ed our office's contact group. No one worked that day. Many people left angry. She left, as she was no longer employed. But one thing she did do was help a LOT of people negotiate better and fair pay."
WILDDDD!!! Have you ever had a coworker get fired at lightning speed? What happened?!
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.