People From Around The World Share The Fastest They Had Ever Seen A New Co-Worker Get Fired

Four or so hours. When I was 18 I got a job at a grocery store, along with three others. We all started training together. On the first day we were training in the evening, and one girl asked to go home, she said her head hurt. They said fine, she clocked out, went to grab a grocery cart and started filling it with beer and liquor. The store manager walked over, and asked her if she was having a party. She said yes. Didn't even try to come up with an excuse. Just, "yeah, I am, so I needed to leave early on my first day." basically. He fired her.

I used to do a lot of field work on site investigation programs - basically we'd hang out on a drill rig while the drillers took rock cores. We'd log the cores, take photos, do some down-hole tests, etc.

New engineer gets sent to site and gets assigned the night shift (some people love night shift, but most people don't... hence sticking the junior with night shift.) After 5 nights he calls the office and says he wants to come home because he's freezing and he hates it and he can't do it. Not clear to me if he quit or got fired, but it became plain pretty quickly that this job wasn't for him.

I got pulled onto that program, and I asked the drillers what the guy's deal was... they had a propane heater in the back of their van, and despite repeated invitations to sit in the back of the van, buddy just sat in his truck all night and shivered. In the middle of February.

Worked at a steel processing plant (polishing, cut to length, etc) Everyone started off as temps, some for years, before getting hired in. Management decided they were short-staffed and the solution was to start hiring people full-time off the street.

So this dude starts, full-time on day one, full benefits, more money, getting trained by temps who've been there for months, if not years. Everyone is mad resentful of this dude, obviously. Halfway through his second day he gets escorted out for testing positive for coke on his drug test. (Coke stays in your system for like 2-3 days)

They didn't hire any more dudes full-time off the street.

The new guy drove a forklift into a fire hydrant, in front of a safety rep for the company. His supervisor was called over, and he immediately tells the supervisor that he won’t pass a urine test, as he used his only bottle of clean pee earlier that day when he was hired in.

Everybody standing there immediately burst into laughter, which continued as security (also laughing) escorted him off-site. Even the supervisor was all smiles...just gave him a pat on the back and wished him the best of luck. It was wild.

A week. I worked in a bar and a new girl started. At work, she seemed a little rough but was fine.

One day she finished a shift, sat at the bar and ordered a red wine with lemonade and ice in it (not really relevant to the story; just shows she is clearly insane). Her boyfriend came in, they had a huge domestic fight in front of my manager and several customers and she threw her drink over her bf and dramatically stormed out.

My sister was fired one day one. My dad had his own small medical practice and would hire me and my sisters as our "first job" to be his receptionist and file insurance claims, so we could get some workplace experience before we went job hunting in the larger world. My older sister worked for him in high school for a year. I worked for him for 2 years, then it came time for my younger sister to take over. I brought her to work to start training and said the number one rule in the office was, "At work he's not dad, he's the doctor and the boss."

She sassed him in front of a patient her first day, with all the venom and sarcasm a teenage girl can muster when dealing with a parent asking her to do something. He fired her on the spot and I had drag her out of there. Mom told her at least she'd get paid for the couple of hours she managed to be employed.

I work construction. We had 2 new hires that were friends starting the same day. Boss told one take a coffee order and come back. Took everyone's money and said he needed his friend to go with him cause it was a big order. They never came back.

I got hired as a long-term temp with one other person to do some basic data entry work at a major brand pretty much everyone has heard of. And it was at their corporate headquarters so pretty prestigious. Anyway, we went through all of this onboarding stuff in the morning that required us to get photo IDs and figure out parking and all that stuff.

Then after 2 or 3 hours, we were introduced to one of the employees in our new department who began going over what we were going to be doing. None of it seemed overly difficult and I figured that while it was a new system I had never used before I'd be able to work it out in a few days as long as I asked questions and took notes. And that was the thing that made me realize that the other person who got hired with me probably lied on her resume and was completely out of her depth.

She didn't take any notes and didn't ask any questions. And whenever I glanced at her I could see flashes of panic on her face. Well, lunchtime came and when we came back she said that another company had called her and offered her a permanent position and she couldn't work with us ay longer. Both me and the person training us knew what was going on but I'll give the other lady credit for finding a way out without losing face too badly.

The takeaway here is: Yes, "Fake it Until You Make it" can and does work. But you gotta be able to fake it. You can't fake faking it.

First week, he's called over to the unstaffed truffle counter by a customer. Hasn't been trained in truffles, so he just grabs one from the display case and sells it to the customer. He doesn't know the display "truffles" are made of plastic and the customer has already paid $90 for it when he realizes. Still not sure if it was an honest mistake or if he was planning to pocket the money. Either way, fired.

This was a pizza place I worked at in college. New guy was started on Thursday. Fine worker, we showed him the ropes. He was on subs which is the easiest job. The instructions are right in front of your face. Friday he no call no shows (it’s Friday. The busiest night of the week. And he and I were the only kitchen workers that weren’t also drivers). Monday a police officer shows up at the restaurant looking for him. No idea what happened as he wasn’t there. Tuesday the owner informed me he was let go.

Where to begin. One person didn't show up for their second day citing culture shock and then spent at least an hour each day complaining about everything to HR. They were gone inside of a month. Some other bloke refused to follow processes and called his manager "an irrelevant woman" in team meetings. Gone within a week.

My "favorite" was technically a new coworker from my perspective only as I'd only just become aware of their existence. They interpreted "we're going to retire that server from production" as "we're going to throw the hardware off of the roof into a skip" and proceeded to head down to the data centre, power the thing off in the middle of the day, drive to his friend's office, plug the box in and deploy a bunch of IVR scripts he'd derived from our proprietary scripts so they could run a bunch of psychic and sex hotlines.

He was gone within 10 minutes of getting that server back.

On the first day, he showed up absolutely REEKING of pot and asked a bunch of people if they would buy him a burger. Later he started acting like we'd been best friends his whole life and told me to call him "snowman" said he could get me anything I wanted and asked if I did heroin smh, the hr lady was walking by and asked to see him in her office. Didn't see him again.

The IT crew at a large government office worked on a ticket system, meaning that the government workers submitted their problem online and one of the IT guys would pick it up on their end. The new guy just started his first day, logged into a computer at an empty office, and submitted a "reinstall entire OS" request so he could spend all day there. The manager decided to check in on him before lunch to see how he was doing, and he was completely asleep. Fired before they even finished his hiring paperwork.

We had a guy hired on a Wednesday or Thursday to Start on Monday. Monday comes around and he walks in a good 30 minutes early and on his cell phone. He walked briskly by my office and I said hello.

He didn't acknowledge the existence of anyone else in the office. Just walked through the admin hallway and out of the warehouse. Never saw him again. I still laugh about it. I never understood why he bothered to come to the office at all.

I was fired on my second day as a line cook at a Mitzels Restaurant in Washington State back in the 90s. Turns out I was hired just to threaten the job security of a long-time line cook with an attitude problem; to keep him in line. He got the message and apologized to the manager, and I was fired for "breaking a yolk when flipping fried eggs" one time. I'd been a line cook for a few years by then and thought I was doing pretty good. I was taken out the back door and terminated on day 2.

I worked at a Doggie Day Care. For group play dogs were put in rooms according to size and we would rotate through the rooms during our shifts. They hired a new girl and on her first day she went into the big dog room and cried hysterically because she was afraid of them.

I don’t think she made it two hours.

I called a temp agency to get someone to help me count inventory. They sent a guy over with a cast on his arm.... That was my first wtf but I went with it because we were just counting parts. Then I came back from lunch and this dude was in my office chair zoned out and drooling on himself with a can of air duster in his lap. I kicked him awake and escorted him out of my warehouse. Never used that temp agency again.

I owned a construction business and we recently hired 3 new employees due to expansion. I didn't get to meet them yet as my business partner was the one who interviewed them and watched them get started on the first day and would check in on them most mornings. Along with the new hire, we promoted one of our best workers to manager to oversee them.

So after a few days I noticed that we were behind schedule on the job, this wasn't all that surprising because we had the new hires but I decided it’s best to go in and check it out to make sure everything was going well. So I call up my manager and tell him to go to a different site (we did multiple sites each day) and that I will take over at the place with the new guys.

I arrive at the site half an hour late due to traffic and everyone is already hard at work, and in fact, they are working efficiently and correctly on everything. I asked them a few questions about what they are doing and so on and get all the right answers. I figured the delay was just the first 2 days of learning and am very pleased that everything was picked up and seemed to go well. Now it is important that at this point I didn't actually introduce myself and nobody asked who I was so it seems everyone just assumed that I was just another worker from the company they never met before.

So two hours before we are supposed to finish for the day, a guy comes over and says "Hey, just so you know, we’re all gonna head out now, but clock in that we worked the whole day. [manager] allows it, and the owners never notice."

So that is the story of how I fired 3 new hires on the first day I met them... and also how I had to fire our best worker.

Day 1 of training. Within the 6th hour of a 8 hour shift.

Worked in a old crank handle service elevator at a private residential condominium ( for very very very wealthy people ). We told him just shut up and stare straight ahead. Don't speak unless spoken to. Cause old rich people are mean and don’t care about you. Well what's the new guy do? Starts a conversation right away and asks the resident, " how much money do you make ".

About 35 minutes.

I hired a guy to work for me as quality inspector for merchandise headed to Walmart & Target. He bragged about everything he stole from his last job during training and how they paid him more than I did. Well, I'm not holding him back from all that money so I had some big guys escort him off the property.

3 hours into the first shift. Guy lost it serving an annoying customer in a grocery shop, throw a cabbage at her. The manager came and told him to go home cause he finished there. He wasn't surprised. I was standing next to him, it was an entertaining day.

I worked for a small city in LA for many years. I was on the board that interviewed for a new intern for the recreation department. We went through the process, made our choice, made the job offer to a nice, smart girl fresh out of college, she was a little bit of a hippy, casual, relatable, it was fine, all accepted.

The girl showed up with her gigantic pet PYTHON wrapped around her neck on the first day.

He didn't show up the first day, second day, or third day.

I had to work a double shift for three days straight. Not fun. I answered the phone when he finally 'called in' on the fourth day.

He said, "I'm going to be honest with you, I've been in Orlando. My parents paid for a small vacation as a reward for getting the job. Would it be okay to start next week instead of this week?"

This was just a summer job at a fast-food place. We had a new girl start and within two days it was apparent she was an idiot and everyone knew that. You could already see the manager questioning his decision.

Then on her third day of work, she said she couldn't come in because her mom was in a car accident and in the hospital. Turns out that's an easy thing to disprove in a relatively small town.

A 19-year-old kid got hired to work the seafood counter. See him twice and then never again. Asked a coworker what happened.

He had closed seafood one night and was walking out of the store and the 5 pounds of crab legs he'd stuffed down the back of his pants fell out in front of the closing manager.

My document processing clerk was getting married and going on his honeymoon so I got a short-term temp. It wasn't a temp-to-hire, everything was out in the open through a legit temp agency who generally did pretty good screening.

The temp's very first day, they show up with a box of things; photos, mugs, office equipment (pen cup, task light, etc.), stuff to decorate a cubicle with. I advised them not to unpack, we were getting right into training. Within two hours after I cut them loose on a computer with a "Let me know if you need anything or have any questions", they said, "This mouse is hurting my wrist. It gave me carpal tunnel. I'm going to need worker's comp paperwork."

I made an immediate call to the agency ending this contract, then told the temp, "Your paperwork is at the temp agency office, go ahead and go see your rep there." They left their box of stuff behind; I had to have the temp agency come pick it up.

This happened last week. New girl is hired and right off the bat starts telling me that she regrets taking this job (despite being unemployed for 4 months) because there are so many new people so it must be a bad job because high turnover. (Not really true. We just got bought by a large company and they are hiring more people because we have more business). She tells us all about how its her birthday and shes going drinking after work. Does a no-call no-show the next day which is her third day.

We all assume she quit. But the next day she comes in and starts just trying to work like nothing happened. The supervisor asked what happened and she said she got in a minor car accident. He asked why she didn’t call and she said she doesn't have a cell phone. Despite being on her cell phone constantly in the office. He decided to give her one more chance but gave her a lecture about how she needs to communicate properly about missing work, and one more incident will be an automatic firing.

Next day no call no show.

We had a recent college grad that would use his corporate card for personal purchases. He figured that the company would just keep deducting from his payroll until it was paid off. He was fired after three months of constant reminders to stop doing it. I don’t think it qualifies as the fastest, because he lasted three months, but it was so idiotic.

I used to volunteer in an elementary school library. It was the beginning of the school year and I was training three new volunteers.

Turns out that one of the new volunteers had been banned from all public schools in our county for assaulting a teacher. The vice-principal came to escort her off the school grounds just as we finished training.

Before their first day on orientation. I got hired for a manufacturing job through Manpower (a temp agency). Me and a friend of my wife were both supposed to start on Monday at the plant for a week-long orientation.

She got into a fender bender on her way to orientation and called them to say that she'd be a bit late, that she just needed to wait on the police to give a statement. The manager told her not to bother ever coming in.

Girl was torn up. She took pictures and the police report in to the hiring manager, tried to explain things to the company HR managers, but no dice. She was fired before ever clocking in.

This was a while ago at my old job. New guy gets hired as a busboy. He was super annoying and tried to insert himself into everyone's conversation whether they wanted him there or not. It only took a couple of hours for the whole restaurant to hate him. I was working the bar and he kept eating the bar fruit. I personally didn't care but the manager did. Manager comes over and tells him to stop eating the fruit. He looks the manager in the eye and eats another piece of fruit. Manager says "Really?" followed by "Come with me to the office". New guy promptly replies with "Alright man, calm down. I can tell you got that macho energy for a good reason" followed with cliche wink and nudge from his elbow. In front of me and like 4 other employees. I wanted to slam my face into the ice bin, it was so cringey to witness.

He promptly walked out the front door 10 minutes later without his uniform on anymore. The worst thing about it was the manager was an insanely laid back guy. Hell, the whole restaurant was insanely laid back. You really had to try hard to get fired from this place. Had he not thrown in that silly line, I'm almost positive he would have just gotten a slap on the wrist and kept the job.

My old boss at Gamestop was 40+ but always tried to hangout and chill with the much younger staff, and altogether just not really acting his age. He was also a hornball that would hire nearly any female applicant, regardless of what was on their application or how stupid they were.

One example I can recall is him hiring a 16~17yo girl for a seasonal position that didn't know the alphabet in order. I had asked her to reshelve game boxes in alphabetical order, and I watched her face contort while staring at the wall, muttering something that sounded like she was trying to remember the alphabet song.

She stayed on for the whole holiday season…

I think 2 days. He destroyed some product but said he didn’t, then the boss gave him a order but he took a walk through the Warehouse instead. The last straw was him getting caught 2 times smoking outside (it's not allowed; we're a food company and have a room for smoking) and he was suspected of stealing but there was no evidence. This all happened before our supervisor caught him the second time smoking outside and then fired him…

Once had a co-worker get fired halfway through his first day. He was a well-qualified rep, plenty of industry experience and seemed cordial enough.. He got fired on his lunch break when management and HR took him to lunch and he made racist jokes about several ethnicities. He was going to be the rep for our El Paso market, which is incredibly diverse, so he was told not to even bother coming back from his lunch break.

A few years ago, a guy at work would casually flirt with one of the part-time women. She didn't mind since she acted like one of the guys, busting our chops and could take a joke as long as you didn't cross the line. Well, one day the guy decided to leave a big long note telling the part-time woman that they should get a hotel and he would leave his wife for her and left it right in her work station. Safe to say the guy was fired really quick. Takes a special kind of stupid to think doing that is ok

I was doing a job in the Middle East. It was for a major port there. We had a new kid show up the previous day from the US. I think he was relatively fresh from college.

Around 1am local time, I get a call from the IT department to track down this kid’s PC because worm for brains was torrenting from his work computer using the company VPN.

This is all kinds of insanely bad ideas, from risking access to our servers, to straight-up getting flagged by the local government. So I wake the kid up by banging on his door, walk over to his laptop, yank it from the wall and pull the battery.

"What the fudge?!?!"

"I'll let you know in the morning" and I took his stuff back to my room and went to sleep.

In the AM, I was told to drive him immediately to the airport. He was fired.

Was working a weekend tech support job... pretty boring, mostly we'd all just sit around surfing the net waiting for the phone to ring. Watched an absolutely alarming number of Netflix DVDs back in those days. I was on their top-tier plan and couldn't cycle through them fast enough.

Coworker comes in, says he's feeling under the weather but wanted to soldier through. Couple hours in, it's still pretty slow and he asks if anyone cared if he took a quick nap. No one cared, so he props up his legs in his cubicle and takes a nap.

Shortly thereafter, CEO of the company walks through on his way to his office. He notices the guy sleeping at his desk, and fires him on the spot.

We tried explaining the situation to our manager on Monday, but there was nothing he could do to get the CEO to reverse his decision.

I worked at the top-ranked private golf course (Texas) as a caddie while in college. Extremely prestigious place. Clock-in is at 6:00 AM SHARP, they did not tolerate being late. They had just hired a new heap of caddies and one of the new ones was pulling in the driveway at 6:05 for his first shift. Our manager stopped him in his car before he could park, leaned in the window and said turn around, you're done.

I was a dishwasher once, and it turned out one of my buddies from middle school was working there. He went to empty the garbage one day and I could hear a bunch of metal clanging in the bag he was hauling.

Turns out he just tossed the utensils so he didn't have to wash them. He was fired the same week I started.

Circa 2013 I worked at a health insurance place. I was 19 but had been there for 2 years so I was call center lead.

Never got a lot of respect due to my age and baby face, which was fine, until a new guy shows up and starts eating edibles in front of me. "You need to chill out bro, they don't even have a supervisor in here, we all just here to vibe and get paid"

I was the supervisor you dingus. He was fired same day.

This guy hadn't even started yet and just had his introductory email sent out to the whole company which ended with incredibly explicit details about himself. He got fired before he even started.

Somehow the company deleted the email from our cloud inboxes when this was sent but not before a colleague grabbed a screenshot of it first. The photo ended up on the internet and blew up. He was going to be a tier 2 tech for the IT company I work at a couple years back. He supposedly apologized profusely saying his friend played a prank on him but the damage had already been done.

I worked as a tech / network support guy at an office and our manager interviewed some applicants and posed them a challenge to troubleshoot a PC that wouldn't boot. Of all the applicants we were impressed by the front runner and he got hired.

Some days later my boss asked me into his office and he showed me a website showing the new guy in a prison jumpsuit attending a substance abuse workshop or something at a correctional facility.

Unfortunately, he hadn't disclosed this so HR gave him the boot, which sucks because he was a sharp guy!

Hired a guy one time and sent him out to a job to start training. He checked into the hotel around 7 pm and was supposed to be on location the next day at 6 am. The hotel calls me at 3 am to tell me that he has managed to pass out drunk in the driveway of the lobby entrance and asked me if I’d like to come get him. Told them that’s what the police were for. He called the next day to tell me he would be on location the next morning. Told him to just go on home.

One and a half hours into the shift as an animal care worker, I was showing my trainee how to clean the kitten rooms and started him on the easiest cage. We’re talking neonatal, six-day-old bottle-feeder kittens. I explained how to set up the kennel, clean them up, etc. I turned around to grab some towels and a fresh hot water bottle when I heard a thump. And then another thump. Turned around and he was tossing the kittens to the other side of the kennel to move them. Like, underhand lobbing a softball, just tossed three kittens out of his way. I freaked out and yanked him down to the supervisor’s office. His excuse was the kittens were ‘attacking’ him, and he felt threatened? So he threw them!!

No warnings, fired on the spot. (The kittens all were fine and got adopted out a few months later. :) )

A new guy started at work (a bar). He seemed cool enough. Three days later we were all sitting around having an end-of-shift drink when the manager calls the new guy into the office and fires him on the spot. It turns out that the new guy wasn't 21 yet. Why would you drink at work when the manager all too well knows your age!?

One of my laziest friends wanted a referral for Jimmy John’s I didn’t give it to him but our other mutual friend did.

First driving shift, he’s due to clock in at 9am. He strolls in at 10:30, shirt untucked, no hat, and ripped jeans (surprisingly strict dress code at JJs).

The General Manager walks over and says, “what’s your name?”

My friend replies: “John Smith”

GM: “Hi, nice to meet you, John Smith. You’re fired.”

My friend sat there for about 10 seconds looking around at a few of his friends that worked there with his mouth wide open before walking right back out. We still give him flack for it to this day.

I worked at a fast-food restaurant and my manager asks me if I know this one girl that he interviewed. I instantly recognize the name because it was my ex-gf that cheated on me. I tell as unbiased as I could that she’d be a terrible hire and he takes note of this. Turns out they didn’t heed my warning and hired her for a kitchen shift which just so happens to be where I work.

Fast forward to her first day she’s barely comprehending what her trainer is telling her and I can already tell she’s stressed out. We’re not even in our busy hour and she asks if she can get a drink. She ended up going home early stating that her anxiety was too much. While this was a bit of a hiccup it’s nothing someone could fire her for.

However that night she ended up dm’ing the entire kitchen staff (including the managers) her nudes and asking for hookups. Her second day she was told to never come back.

Had a guy leave orientation after less than 30 minutes after clocking in, claiming he had a family emergency. Didn't show up for the next two days or answer his phone when we called to check up on him.

On the third day, he calls me at work, I was to be his manager, and tells me he's in jail. He got arrested for smoking crack. He somehow managed to stay off of it long enough to pass the drug screening.

He faked the reason for leaving work and went home to smoke. He couldn't wait, pulled into a parking lot somewhere and started smoking in full view of a cop car sitting thirty feet away. His dumb self actually wanted me to come down and pay his bail.

Logistic company. There was a guy who was in his first year after he was fired in other companies before. He ditched every time he could. Made so many breaks to smoke or to chat with coworkers. One evening he went to take a dump. Ground floor toilet was closed. I was on the second floor. He didn‘t know that the top floor was the manager area. He went in there when like 30 minutes passed the manager knocked on the door to ask if everything was okay. No response. He went downstairs to the coworkers and checked the camera. Another 20 minutes passed and the guy came out with his iPhone in his hand laughing. He was fired immediately.

Day one, he hit a parked car in the parking lot, with the person still inside. When he was confronted he lost his mind and even used threats. The man he hit walked up to security and said "don't let that man into my building. People like that don't work for me"

Turns out he hit the director's Porsche...