25 Of The Dumbest Reasons Someone Lost Their Job

Losing a job can happen in various ways, even in positions where terminations are uncommon. However, some individuals stand out for their unique and often amusing approaches to leaving a job. Stories like these are bound to bring a smile to your face. A recent online inquiry prompted Redditors to share tales of the most absurd reasons their colleagues were fired, and the responses flooded the thread with entertaining and downright hilarious anecdotes.

#1 Guy tried to hit on the girl that helped us clean up after closing time by inviting her to the back “for some fun times, just me and you baby.” Girl was 15 years old and *the daughter of the owner*.

Image source: ConstableBlimeyChips, Antonius Ferret

#2 Did a minor safety infraction 10 minutes into the job, I pointed it out. He stormed off saying “Nobody tells me what to do”.

Image source: Captain_Coco_Koala, Anamul Rezwan

#3 New office assistant was asked to drop some laptops off at Fedex to be shipped. Come to find out she literally just walked in, saw the line was too long and just left them on the counter. She expected FedEx to know what to do with them. We have no idea what happened to them. They decided to keep her, which was a mistake because she ended up emailing all of our competitors highly sensitive information by mistake.

Image source: bromosabeach, Camila Bou

#4 Smelled a stool a woman had been sitting on in front of a room full of people like it was a fine and normal thing to do.

Image source: SnooCheesecakes9872, Giorgio Trovato

#5 I worked at a Sonic and we had a new policy: no leggings. They hung up signs around about it, texted the group chat, the whole nine. They did this for two weeks.

A co-worker came in with leggings and refused to go home and change or use the spare pants one of my co-workers kept in the car. She was fired.

Image source: EdelwoodEverly

#6

Image source: red_dawn, Roberto Hund

Had a coworker who had a princess mentality. She thought she could do whatever she wanted one day and decided to test the waters.

She decided to start leaving early without clocking out. The first one or two times people were fine doing it for her because maybe she was forgetful.

However, she’d leave at 12-1 and then text someone around 5-6p to log her out.

Then it became repetitive. Leadership didn’t do s**t.

Then one day – she walked into the office kitchen, took someone’s lunch out of the fridge and decided it was hers. She saw it was a sandwich but wasn’t sure what it was and literally walked up to the very coworker whose lunch she stole and asked him ‘Hey what’s in this sandwich?’ She didn’t know it was his.

Lost his f*****g s**t. That’s what got her. Asking someone what was in the sandwich she stole. Asking the very person who made that lunch. They finally decided to get her for timeclock fraud too.

#7

Image source: marra2020, RDNE Stock project

A male coworker hid under a coworkers desk first thing in the morning. Unfortunately for him, he didn’t realize a desk swap had happened the day before. Woman sits down on the chair, and that’s when he chose to scare her. She injured her abdominal area on the underside of the desk because she was 7 months pregnant.

She moved to that desk to be closer to the washrooms. Instead, she went on sick leave for the rest of her pregnancy because of the resulting injury/trauma.

#8 I worked at dollar general. Pretty hard to get fired there. My coworker got caught selling [substances] to customers. They just nicely asked him not to anymore. Half my coworkers were drunk or high. If you get fired from dollar general, you really f****d up.

Image source: manykeets, Mike Petrucci

#9 He brought cough drops into the work site.

Now this might seem minor, but I work for a company that breeds rodents for laboratory testing.  *The* top concern, after the welfare of our animals, is biosecurity.  When I get to work in the morning, I strip completely naked, pass through a timed, locking shower, and then dress in sterile clothes provided by the company.  The *only* items we are allowed to bring through the showers with us are prescription eyewear or hearing aids.  *Any* other item, unless specially authorized by management, is an automatic firing.  Can’t even wear my wedding ring or simple stud earrings.

I know the dude knew this, because they are VERY clear about it and he’d worked there for years.  I guess he just thought if he tucked it behind the spare uniform in his cubby nobody would know.  But our manager happened to come inside that day, he saw the bag, asked whose cubby it was, and that was that.

The really sad thing was that this was at the beginning of covid, so even if he wasn’t sick with covid all he had to do was tell management that he had a bad cough and they would have given him time off with pay until he got better.  He threw away a steady, well-paying job in the middle of a pandemic because…I don’t know, I guess he was too proud to call out sick?

Image source: Lachwen

#10

Image source: ScrewAttackThis, Edmond Dantès

Dude made a coworker uncomfortable by asking her out and not taking no for an answer. She mentioned something to HR in passing and they jumped on it. He was told to not contact her for any reason until HR can work out what to do (basically just over the weekend).

He contacts her and got fired on the spot. I talked with him about it after and he just did not understand what he did wrong. Worst part is he was planning on showing up to a work event even though he was fired. Thankfully he at least took my advice to not do that.

#11

Image source: Extension-Housing153, Andrew Neel

He pantsed a guy in the middle of the office.

Literally pulled a Co-workers pants down in front of the full office. Underpants came along for the ride.

The pantser was fired.
The pantsee was off work for 6 weeks due to “distress”

#12

Image source: GuiltyLawyer, Mizuno K

I have a few from people I worked with:

One guy stood at the bottom of the stairs and pretneded he was fiddling with his phone but was trying to get upskirt pictures of the women walking down. A woman coming down the stairs saw what he was doing and called security. That was a weird HR experience. The guy, who in previous interactions seemed pretty normal, was creepy as hell. Only time while I was there that we had to follow threat procedures. Didn’t have to worry about him very long though because the cops found a lot of those types of videos on his personal computer and apparently some underage stuff too so he got locked up.

I had to fire a woman because she would not stop trying to get the people who reported to her to buy her kids’ school fundraiser items. It was against company policy for managers to directly solicit but there was a way to have an admin post things so that it was blinded, that way people didn’t feel pressured to purchase things from the person responsible for their compensation increases and bonuses.

There was a front desk admin at this one place where I worked who was generally unpleasant but very good at her job so that wasn’t enough to let her go. A data analyst who was on maternity leave came into the office with her baby. We all gathered near the front because it was a quick visit. I asked the data analys how her husband was doing (poor guy was in a car accident the week before) and the admin went off for 5 minutes about how could anyone ask about her husband when it was the woman who did all the work and had to carry the baby and breastfeed and stay up all night when it cried. When she tired out the CFO looked at the head of HR and said, “How about now?” Admin was gone within the hour.

#13

Image source: scissorslizardspock, cottonbro studio

Dude I worked with at an outdoor retail store lit off a can of Bear Spray, indoors, during business hours.

I wasn’t there at the time, but as the Outdoor Supervisor, I got called in to deal with the mess.

Thankfully, the idiot fired it into a corner behind the gear counter, so he mostly got himself. However, Bear Spray comes out in a kind of dense fog, unlike “regular” pepper spray that comes out in a stream.

The whole store had to be evacuated and it took like 4 bottles of neutralizer to get the carpet “clean” again.

Dumb Dumb claimed he dropped it by accident, but the security camera showed him very clearly popping the safety and hitting the thumb trigger.

During his out-processing, the GM and I showed him the video and asked what was actually going through his head. He said:

*”I wanted to see how bad it was. It was really bad”*

The intrusive thoughts won, I guess.

Last I heard, the dummy had bought a tow-truck and started a towing business.

#14

Image source: captainmagictrousers, noelle

A coworker infested the office with fleas, but he didn’t get fired until he did it *a second time*.

The first time it happened, the boss closed down the office and had an exterminator come in, and told the guy “Here’s a laptop. You telecommute now.”

It turned out, he lived in a trailer with over a dozen stray cats. He kept taking in these strays and just not doing anything for them – no shots, no flea treatments, not even a bath. So pretty soon, the whole place was infested with fleas. He just didn’t realize how bad it was because he was on some cocktail of medications that made him smell odd. Apparently the smell made the fleas not want to bite him. They just got in his clothes and he carried them to work.

After a few days, he was already complaining to my boss that the laptop didn’t work right. My boss tried to send me to this guy’s trailer to fix whatever was wrong, but I said I would rather quit than set foot in Fleapalooza 2012. So he told my coworker to just deal with it himself.

A couple weeks later, the guy came in to the office to pick up his paycheck. In the 30 seconds he was inside, he infested the place again. After that, everyone threw a fit. The boss only fired the guy to avoid a full-scale revolt.

#15

Image source: Shahfluffers, Yan Krukau

I saw someone get let go because they didn’t have a “good attitude.”

For context:

Myself and a few other people had just been hired for an entry level accounting job. Those first few weeks/months were… rough.

The CFO had a tendency of greeting newer people without telling them who he was. One would never expect this guy to be in C-Suite by the way he dressed. He didn’t even have a LinkedIn profile, so unless one dug around it was hard to figure out who he was.

Anyways, he stopped by our pod and greeted us. Asked us how we were doing.
One guy made the mistake of being honest and said that he was tired. And not in a cheery way. I didn’t blame him. We were all tired.

The next day this guy was “let go.” I overheard later from a gossiping supervisor that the CFO hated “bad attitudes” and made it a point to remove them from the company whenever possible.

Since then I have been extra-guarded about how I respond to questions whenever I join a new company until I learn who to trust.

#16

Image source: goth-milk

She already had a few trips to HR and then got moved to another department at another site.

She went out to her car to go to lunch, then came back into the office. She then claimed someone put a note on her car in the parking lot that read: “Get out of town, racial epithet.”

Hands note to supervisor. She got loud in the office area, started to list off names of who she suspected, and everyone heard what was going on.

HR pulls her into a meeting later that afternoon and says “we had security pull the video recording of the parking lot for the first 4 hours of the day…do you wish to change your story?”

She was let go immediately.

#17

Image source: CharsOwnRX-78-2, Pickawood

He took a turn too fast on the fork truck. Got two wheels lifted off the ground. Supervisor told him to cut it out and drive safe.

“Safe?? **SAFE???!?** NOTHING in this place is safe!!”

And then he spent twenty minutes running around the plant floor tripping alarms and setting off the emergency air horns to “prove” that none of it worked (all of it worked).

He finally left when the super threatened to call the cops.

Everyone was real confused about his outburst… until we found the half-empty bottle of tequila out behind the dumpster.

#18 My immedate supervisor planned a european vacation with her girlfriend for a year. Got time off in writing, paid out $12000 in advanced deposits etc. Two days before she was supposed to leave the big boss said he was going on vacation and she had to skip her european fully paid trip. She went anyway and got fired for it.

Image source: Fluffy-Hotel-5184, Te lensFix

#19 A friend’s coworker got fired for paying [escorts] with the company’s credit card.

Image source: Whole-Act3060, Rapha Wilde

#20 He just didn’t log into work. It was a remote job, he was new, we weren’t expecting a lot of him. But he wouldn’t log in or respond to Teams messages asking how he was doing in an entire day. Honestly pretty stupid like, you don’t even have to _go_ to work.

Image source: sexrockandroll, Andrea Piacquadio

#21 Had a friend call in for him. “Mike got run over by a car, he’s dead”. The next day when I fired him he demanded his last check. I told him we would send it to the next of kin.

Image source: samlowry5611, RDNE Stock project

#22 They thought there was 10 inches in a foot, and did a bunch of over-height trucking permits wrong (example: writing 13.6 feet at 13 feet 6 inches) and ended up delaying the shipment of a crane for a critical construction job which got the entire trucking company blacklisted.

Image source: Head_Crash, Guillaume TECHER

#23 Called the boss an a*****e at a staff meeting. Speaking truth to power is rarely a good idea, especially in front of a laughing crowd.

Image source: Tequila_Shockingturd, Christina @ wocintechchat.com

#24

Image source: Regnes, Mizuno K

I work for the Canada Revenue Agency, and we are instructed to never look at our own file upon being hired and told in no uncertain terms that it will be immediately flagged and would be the end of your career. At least once a year around tax season I will get a memo reminding us of this because several people looked up their own file.

Plugging your phone into your computer is also a big no-no because it can store information or compromise the network, I get yearly reminders about that too. I once watched a co-worker plug her phone in, I told her to take it out, but it was too late and she was escorted out within the hour.

#25

Image source: Guardian-Boy, Ajay Parab

Worked at a grocery store for my first job. Friend got fired for Not taping his receipt to his bottle of water he kept at his register. Manager said, “It sends the message to customers that employees get free products.”

Luckily the manager herself was also fired not long after that for being all around s****y and our new manager was crazy awesome.