We’ve all made a mistake or two at work, but most of the time it only results in a slight warning and you can attribute it to a learning experience.
However, sometimes the mistakes can be more than a minor mistake and cost someone’s job.
Whether it’s getting caught pulling a health insurance fund or getting way too drunk during the work Christmas party, British employers have taken to Reddit to share the dumbest ways their employees have gotten themselves fired.
To kick off the ‘AskUK’ thread, a Redditor wrote that his employee “picked up a sick person from his job at a restaurant saying he had a cluster headache and diarrhea.”
Whether it’s getting sick or getting way too drunk at the work Christmas party, employers have taken to Reddit to share the dumbest ways their employees have gotten themselves fired (stock image)
‘Went drinking all day in a pub less than 100 yards from work. Guess where all the restaurant staff go for drinks after work?’
Another boss said their employee “Joined the day before the work Christmas party, became absolutely w********, called the boss’s wife as***, offered to ab*** the boss *** to apologize .
Then she was put in a cab home, took another cab back to the location, told the woman if she wasn’t like that she wouldn’t have to offer to fuck her husband to make him feel better.
“Called Monday morning to ask if she should bother coming in and was told it was probably safer to stay out…”
One reply joked “the hangxiety after that would have been off the scale.”
A woman got very drunk at the work Christmas party a day after joining, and her employment was quickly terminated
Going too heavy on alcohol seems to be a common theme, although it is much more acceptable at a party than at school.
An employer said a man turned up as part of the school’s maintenance crew who was ‘supposedly an experienced chippy with good all-round skills’.
“He was called into our music department to fix the leaky sink and discovered a fridge full of wine – the department often had after-work functions so always had a few bottles in the staff room.
So the new guy drank as much as he could and passed out on the floor — all spark.
“A female teacher came in saw him and screamed, he jumped up and started screaming too because he also had no idea where he was and then ran out. He was clearly let loose and it was barely lunchtime on his first day.”
As for the early days, it can’t get much worse, can it?
However, someone else chimed in: “I had an employee try to set up a porn server through our guest network on his first day — lasted until lunchtime.
“When you see the rare pairing of someone from IT services with someone from HR going to your office, you know it’s not right”
“When you see the rare pairing of someone from IT services with someone from HR going to your office, you know it’s not good.”
He later added, “This was at a university, and it’s normal for people to use their stuff, so he had his laptop with him, which was totally normal – the rest not so much.”
“He registered his laptop *with his name* on the guest network and then tried to bypass the firewall/block list.
“When we called him into my office, his first comment was, ‘Is this about the porn?’
Another user explained how their employee tried to get away with a holiday in Tenerife saying they had an accident:
Went AWOL, then claimed they had been in the hospital after an accident with no phone for a week.
‘I unknowingly put my foot in it when I came back from my 2 week holiday and asked if they enjoyed Tenerife too. They were on the same flight and I even snapped a photo of them in the background of a selfie with my boyfriend as we boarded the plane!
“The best part is if she’d just asked for the vacation, it would have been granted — no one could understand why she’d done it!”
Another user explained how their employee tried to get away with a holiday in Tenerife saying they had an accident
Some companies even track their employees, but they still try their luck.
A boss explained that they used to work for an HVAC company and all the vans were fitted with trackers. Firstly, they could ‘see where the mechanics were to minimize their movement between jobs, but also to see who was where in case of an emergency’.
They continued, “One engineer had clearly forgotten his tracker. I couldn’t contact him by phone at all and when I looked on the tracker he was nowhere near where he should have been – he was at his local public golf course, about 50 miles from where he should have been.
‘When I got a hold of him he was telling me a load of old bangs about how he’s been stuck on the M6 in traffic jams for the past 2 hours. Yes, now go to the office and give your van and keys to mate.’
Other employees tried to pay a little too much attention to the perks of their jobs – one Redditor wrote: ‘While working in a student bar, a man started pulling pints during a shift – expected to be fired immediately, but was just sent home that day sent. Tried again a few weeks later – then fired.”
Another added: ‘My boyfriend was fired from M&S for eating the contents of a damaged pack of Percy Pigs. They would have been thrown away, but M&S had a strict policy on them.’