Faking an injury and threatening to sue the company...while he was being investigated for fraud. Kid was like 19, set to earn $50k a year. But no, gotta get that extra $300 by lying about reimbursable expenses.

At my old job, an IT guy and his boss were setting up a new cubicle. The IT guy dropped a monitor and it was destroyed. Out of nowhere, he went into this rant at his boss about how he wasn't going to pay for this and included all kinds of curse words. The manager just stood there stone faced, waited for him to finish and said something like, "Legally, we can't make you pay for that since it was an honest mistake. But since you just cussed me out, you're fired."

I had to fire a guy from my gas station about 5 years ago. He worked the night shift and was great for over a year. He was 35ish recovering drinker. One day he started playing some game on his phone and it quickly became a problem. He wouldn't do anything else, not even look at the customers he was ringing up. I told him countless times. I need you to focus on customers, if the store is empty then play on your darn phone! Anyways he couldn't, so I let him go.

A few days later his mother comes to me crying. Turns out she was in the hospital for the past month and he had ranked up $50,000 in credit card debt on Clash of Clans. CLASH OF CLANS! He spent $50,000 just to get fired.

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Pawnshop employee stole $400 from the cash register, then realized that there were video cameras. He had no idea where the security footage was stored so in order to cover his tracks he set the store on fire. He actually ended up getting pretty badly burned in the process and went to jail right after the hospital.

Had a guy who we hired who showed a lot of potential. He was a little arrogant and had a good sized ego, but wasn't that much of a problem. He was very good at sales and eventually it went to his head: he started showing up late all the time, leaving early, cutting corners where he could.

The final straw came when he showed up late and someone spoke up about it to him. He decided the best choice of words he could yell were" "I MAKE THE MOST SALES AND I HAVE THE BIGGEST [BLEEP] SO YOU CAN ALL [BLEEP] OFF!"

He was fired on the spot. The customers thought it was pretty funny though.

I used to own a bakery and a woman quit because she blamed her yeast infection on a bad batch of yeast I bought from China. I may be a guy but I don't think that's how it works...

My company is a contractor for a giant corporation. We go to different stores to do work. This new guy we hired seemed normal at first but it turned out he was a complete and total idiot.

So one day, he goes on site with one of the senior employees to shadow him. This genius thought that because we did work for the giant corporation we could just eat anything off the shelves and from the refrigerators for free. Well, the employee saw this and was like... "What are you doing? You need to pay." Then the supervisor came and told him the same thing. This idiot then started fighting with the manager. When he got fed up, he just got in his car after and drove off. Needless to say his butt was fired the next day.

I run a medical clinic. An employee told a patient he wanted to "know what she tastes like." It doesn't get much more fired than that.

I used to manage a store in the mall. One of my employees, I'm pretty sure, was cheating on her husband with a mall security guard. I would come by on my days off and he'd scurry out in a fluster.

I never mentioned it, but the guy was coming by ALL the time to the point that it was keeping her from doing her job. Finally, we had a work meeting and I said in a very non accusatory way, something like this:

"I know it gets slow in here during the week, and I'm guilty of it myself, but from now on I need everyone to keep personal visits to a minimum or during your lunch break."

She stood up and started screaming at me. How dare I accuse her. I'm a witch. She quits. After that, she continued to call me and leave me harassing voice-mail for a while too.

This woman was using our company FedEx account to deliver purses for her personal Etsy shop.

Tool and die shop owner here. One of our machinists would go out for lunch and slam back 3-4 drinks every day. When I found out I told him he can't drink at lunch. He said it was his time and what he did at lunch was his business, not mine. The next day he came back from lunch smelling like a souse, so I let him go on the spot.

A few years later he showed up in my office asking for his old job back. He said that he had had a problem back then and was sorry for his behavior. He was now sober and needed a job. I hired him on the spot and it worked out great for 5 or 6 years. Then he started drinking again and I had to let him go a second time.

I have no idea how he is doing now but I often wonder. He was a great machinist and a nice guy when he was sober. But that's not something I could ignore. If he hurt himself and had any drinks in him I would have been screw. The second time he didn't drink at lunch, but was out of it at 7:00 am from the night before. It was a shame because he had his stuff together for a few years, then his demons caught up with him.

I worked for a boutique hotel (you know, small, cute, expensive) as an ops manager. Basically, unless the area manager had to come in, I was the law.

One night, I get a frantic call on my down time from an employee claiming our overnight guy tried to assault him.

I heave a sigh, as the guy freaking out is notorious for being a drama queen. I load up the security camera on my home PC, go to the time frame, and... holy crap. Our night guy legitimately lunged at his coworker and tried to strangle him. Luckily a desk was between them, and that gave the victim time to bolt. I instantly felt like a jerk for doubting him.

Well, this is when I call in the area manager. We show up at the crack of dawn and speak with the dude who made the attack and he claims he didn't do it. We show him the video, and I kid you not he responds with: "I don't recall the events of that evening."

So we fired him on the spot. What started the fight, you ask? Well, the victim had done extra work to make the attackers shift easier. The attacker felt like this was an insult to his work ethic.

Oh, and I got multiple reference requests from similar hotels asking for a good reference. I simply said I wasn't able to provide a positive reference, as legally that was all I could say.

My wife and I started a small software company 20 years ago. She's the manager and does sales and HR. I do the programming.

Anyway we hired a programmer one time and the first day on the job I spent the whole morning with him going over our development philosophy, how we do source control etc and then showed him an overview of our applications and how we build them. Along the way he was highly critical, pointing out what he considered flaws in everything.

After lunch he goes back in to see my wife. He obviously didn't know we were married (we don't share surname and at work we keep pretty much to ourselves). He says to my wife, "You know how to fix this company? You need to fire that other guy." We still laugh about that one.

Years ago (like in the 90's), my husband worked for a small company. He did a little bit of everything and one of his jobs, along with a co-worker, was keeping all the computers running. Now this was a sales-based company, so all of the salespeople had laptops for themselves. If there was an issue or problem, they'd bring them in to be looked at.

So, one day, one of the non-local sales guys was in for a meeting. He said, "Hey, my computer is running really, really slowly. Can you take a look at it?" My husband says, "Yeah, sure no problem." Sales guy leaves the computer and goes to whatever meeting he was off to.

My husband and his colleague take a look and see that the disk is nearly full and figured that was slowing things down. They dig deeper and see the computer is filled with adult content, like FILLED with it. Of all sorts - nothing illegal per se, but very, very close to it. Now, mind you, the salespeople signed an agreement that their assigned computer was for business use only, not personal use.

So we have a slight problem here. My husband and his colleague, not wanting to make a mountain out of a molehill and not wanting the guy to lose his job over a fixable problem, just wiped the drive clean, reformatted it, got things set up again and the computer was working great.

The guy came back the next day and my husband goes, "Hey, we took a look at your computer. It was running slowly because the disk was nearly full with personal files so we wiped it clean, reformatted things and you're good to go. You know, just a reminder, that [OurCompany]-issued computers are for business use only. If you're looking for something for personal use, here are some relatively inexpensive laptops with a lot of storage space. You can put whatever you want on it. Small investment for privacy, you know."

And with that, they gave him a printout list of some good, reasonably-priced laptops he could purchase for himself.

The sales guy just kind of mumbled something, grabbed his computer and was on his way without so much as a "thank you." Well, the guys figured that was that, but guess who was back six weeks later with a slow computer? Yep. The same sales guy. The problem? Yep, same as before.

They were done at this point. The two of them went straight to the president's office, showed her what was on the computer (well, enough to give her an idea) and explained what had happened previously. She was a very no-nonsense lady, so needless to say by 3pm that afternoon, that sales guy was no longer employed.

What an idiot.

About a year ago, I hired a guy who was down on his luck. Honestly, it went against my best judgement. Due to the nature of my business, I usually don’t hire people that fit his profile. It wasn’t long before I started hearing complaints from female employees and clients.

Turns out that he would often attempt to flirt with women and when turned down, he would lose his mind and call them terrible names and insults. I don’t tolerate that nonsense, so I gave him a very stern warning. The very next day, I found one of my sweetest female employees visibly upset. Upon inquiring, she said that the moron had followed her home yesterday to “make sure she got home safely.” Then he showed up this morning to “escort her to the office.” She was genuinely scared.

I called him into my office and told him to scram. He threatened to file a complaint with the Department of Labor for discrimination against “men who have an innate need to protect women.”

Didn’t matter. Told him to beat it! And now I’m fighting the stupid claim with the DoL.

This guy showed up hammered, fell asleep at his desk, harassed women in the bar after work.

After we fired him, he hung around outside the offices. Came back and loitered a few days later too. Then sent me an SMS: "You ruined my life, I'm going to ruin yours."

5 years later he tried to connect on LinkedIn, and a recruiter asked me for a reference. WTF? "A+++ Great worker, would highly recommend." Oh wait.

I fired a guy because he said he couldn't come to work because it was raining and he had just washed his car the day before.

Had a guy on a location fake an injury. Now mind you he did injure himself severely accidentally, but that wasn't his plan. His plan had been to fake a minor injury and get put on workers comp. The problem was he screwed up how to do it and ended up hurting himself severely.

You ask how did you know he was trying to fake injure himself. Well that's very easy to explain. We had a 20 minute tape of him hiding behind one of the trucks on the worksite practicing his fall. Then a written confession from friends saying that he'd been planning it since the day we hired him.

Not my business, but my dad's. He hired predominantly people with criminal records and literally all they had to do was inspect rental cars for damage as the cars left the lot and keep their noses clean. You could do pretty much anything you wanted on your down time with no complaints from my dad as long as he didn't get any complaints from the owners of the car lot.

One day one of the supervisors of the car lot I worked for walks out and asks me for my dad's number. Supervisor had caught a guy stealing gas from the property. He even had security camera footage of it happening. Dude was instantly fired.

At a previous job we had issues with food being stolen from the break room fridge. The company made a big stink about it and it kept happening so they very obviously installed security cameras in the break room. Like big freaking cameras in plain sight, pointing at the fridge, with our bosses being very direct about it. "There is the camera, you really want to lose your job over eating someone's sandwich?"​

A few days later this guy gets fired for stealing food. Literally on camera just grabbing people's lunches out of the fridge and eating them.

I work on employee claims and lawsuits. A guy filed a discrimination complaint against the company after he got fired for stealing hot dogs from the refrigerator.

This warehouse (it was a big company) kept a stock of hot dogs for employee appreciation picnics (usually weekly cookouts). No one knew why they were disappearing, so announcements were made and all employees were asked to not eat the hot dogs. If they wanted some they could ask but they couldn’t take several packs at a time.

That didn’t work, so warnings were announced. Finally a camera was installed near the refrigerator and he got caught red handed. He was just practically inhaling the hot dogs directly from the refrigerator, sucking them down by the pack.

After he was fired, he filed a discrimination claim on the basis of disability due to his weight. I sent the response with a video of him eating the hot dogs. Also, he couldn’t prove his weight was a disability under the ADA and weight is not a protected class. We won that claim.

An employee had a corporate credit card. She charged a vacation, a purse, a Fossil watch, take-out, and on top of all that she was just overall miserable to work with. She also had her laptop “stolen” within weeks of joining.

I fired her, and a few days later a watch catalog from Fossil showed up at the office with her name on it.

We still have active court cases for all her theft.

The one that instantly jumps to mind was the woman who was fired day 2 of a call center training course because she wouldn't stop touching herself.

Not sure how she got through HR screening. This was for a wireless phone company too, not a chat line or anything.

Since people requested details. It was really somewhat sad. She was late 30's, early 40's and I don't think this was an employment scam or anything of the like and more likely just a mental compulsion or something.

It was really not that subtle but done under a shawl/scarf thing draped over her lap. She was politely and quietly asked to stop by the trainer. She stopped momentarily but started up again 15-20 minutes later.

Back when I had my translation business, I hired a guy to seek out contracts for me. I'd pay him 20% finder's fee.

Instead of sending the finished project to a client, he accidentally sent naked pictures of himself. I learned of it when my client forwarded me the e-mail half an hour later, including the (multiple) glorious junk shots.

I don't even...

I had a subcontractor on a job for my company try and convince the client that they should dump me and go with their business and they would undercut me by 10%.

Learned this from the client, who asked me to find another person to service our contract.

A guy threw a hammer at another guy for changing the radio station.

My dad owned his own business working as a color corrector/editor. He had this one employee who had been there since day one and ended up becoming similar to an assistant manager. My dad owned that company for 10+ years and, just recently, he had to fire the assistant manager because apparently he was telling employees and customers that my dad hates gay people, people who aren’t white, his kids, his whole family, that he’s a terrible person, etc. Basically driving all business away, pushing my dad’s company towards bankruptcy. Turns out he was a narcissistic sociopath.

My dad’s just sad his employees never trusted him enough to tell him about what this guy would say to them.

We hired a new girl for the local pharmacy I managed, very sweet and hardworking and had prior experience at another major pharmacy chain.

We had our own build of a common pharmacy software, and it took a day to train on how the system worked, and a day to train on how our company's process worked. She paid great attention to the first day and knew her ins and out of the software, but then checked out on the second day because she already knew how pharmacy process worked since she's worked in one before.

But ours didn't follow the same protocol or procedure. We had no storefront, we were purely delivery only. These deliveries needed to be scheduled in a specific order and as efficiently as possible. As compared to retail chains where they will fill Drug1 on Monday, Drug2 on Wednesday, and Drug3 on Thursday so you have to come in three different times.

We could not drill this into her head no matter how many times we tried. She was retrained by me twice, and by two other colleagues because we thought maybe a different training mindset would be beneficial.

The day I had to fire her, she had an appointment that night to take her sick cat to the vet to get put down. I felt like the biggest jerk in the world and wanted to cry with her, but I also felt like I gave her so many chances and she kept coming back to "we always did it this way at the other place."

This staff member had to take a pee test, so he brought a little sample jar of clean urine with him, and went into the toilet with it. He came out, gave the fake sample to the dude who was doing the test and got fired on the spot. You see, the sample was cold, and fresh pee is hot.

We had a young IT intern helping with some hardware inventory tasks. It wasn’t uncommon for laptops not to make it back to us every now and then, but one day we noticed this inter's backpack open and a laptop of a model we used sticking out.

So we sent him to the other side of the building and checked the serial number and yep - it was one he reported as missing during a recent inventory.

Opportunistic theft is one thing but bringing it back into the office every day is... just... wow.

My wife's cousin worked with me and her father at our work (landscaping) for a couple months. He had previous experience and we needed the help so we hired him, despite warnings to the owner from the family that he was useless.

To name a couple of things:

We were putting fresh mulch in one of the industrial parks that we maintained, and he had me close the doors to the bed of the truck, after which he raised the bed so all the mulch would slide to the back. Except the doors weren't designed for that type of load, and immediately sprang open. If they hadn't hit the ground while swinging open, they would have royally screwed up the cars on either side of us. He then proceeded to call the owner of the company and tell him what happened, placing all the blame on me for "not closing the doors right."

Took him on a paver job, and he insisted that he could cut pavers with our wet saw. Except he didn't use gloves, so the material from the pavers being cut (which includes some nasty stuff) absolutely destroyed the skin on his hands, and he called in sick for the next two days because he couldn't move his fingers. This was not the first time that he had made this mistake.

Same paver job, which called for Belgium block to be installed along the driveway. He decided it would be a good idea to mix the mortar and the sand for the base on the owner's (freshly paved) driveway, and use it as he needed it. Except it rained the day he did so, and he ended up with a three-quarter-ton block of what was essentially concrete in the middle of their (again, freshly paved) driveway.

On multiple occasions we got reports from the grass cutting crew that he went out with that he did nothing all day except sit in the truck, text his wife, and smoke. He thought he could get away with this because neither myself nor my father in law were with him.

Eventually he was fired, and we got a couple extremely nasty (but entertaining) phone calls from his wife calling all of us some choice names while vowing that we were no longer part of his family.

This guy was extremely nerdy, and this is from a self-confessed nerd. He was absolutely obsessed with Pokemon, Magic the Gathering, and Yu-Gi-Oh. Literally the only things he would ever talk about, and would talk about them for as long as you'd let him.

One day I'm on register and I see him being dragged out of the store by cops in handcuffs. Turns out he had been shoplifting tons of playing cards of those above listed games. At least $500 worth, as our store policy was to let an employee "get away with it" up to that amount before busting them, I think because the charges stick harder or something.

A new heavy mechanic was hired. Claimed to have prior experience. He was hired because he had a kid on the way and was in a bad spot financially and the owners had a soft spot for unlucky people...

Within a week his nickname was Al-Most. He almost did the work correctly. He almost rewired an electrical system, he almost rebuilt an air dryer successfully, he almost mounted tires. The probability of the part he rebuilt failing within a week was a solid 60%. By the end of week two it was clear most of his knowledge was book learned and not real world. They wouldn't let him do anything except change oil. Once his probation period was up and he showed no improvement or drive they let him go. Trucks only make money when they move and he couldn't keep them moving.

I had to fire someone for trying to start a console war with an 8 year old who really liked Nintendo, while the former employee was a diehard Xbox fan. He didn't even try to be playful about it, he was downright cruel to this poor kid.

Best story was from back in the day when I worked at a veterinary clinic.

A girl got fired for basically hating cats and dogs. She said as a receptionist she thought she would only have to talk to people. She didn’t even like people. Thank goodness that manger switched into a different role; that wasn’t even her worst hire.

I used to do some consulting work so I hired this woman to help out. Mostly clerical stuff and whatnot. I flew down to St. Thomas for a meeting and got a call from the security company at 10:30pm. She had keys to my building but didn't know about the alarm. Basically, she and her boyfriend brought another couple down to have a... group encounter in one of my offices I had converted to a bedroom where I could crash if I worked late.​

So I called her... She answered mid-coitus and acted normal, albeit a little tipsy. I talked about a few mundane details I needed to relay to her anyways and then mentioned to make sure she only was ever at the office between 7:00pm and 7:00am since there was a silent alarm that that would call me with audio of activities in the building.

​When I got back into town, her keys were sitting on my desk.

My dad and I ran a business together cleaning out foreclosed homes for a real estate agency as I was finishing high school. I was a senior so I got out at lunch time and we could usually get a house done in a half day. Sometimes we’d get some bad ones and we had a few guys that we would call to see if they wanted to make a quick hundred bucks for a days work.

On my literal last day of class, my dad picked up one of our usual guys and got one house about 90% done by lunch. He was a pretty normal guy that we had never had any trouble with. The guy we paid to help my dad went out to the truck and came back into that house with a gun and robbed my dad of his wallet and took his keys and left in our truck.

Funny thing is my dad only had the cash he was about to give him an hour later for finishing up the house. The state police got the guy’s number from us and they told him some bogus story about how my dad was being investigated for not paying his workers and if met them with the truck they would get his statement and let him go. Idiot pulls up and gets arrested on the spot. He got 8 years in prison.

A worked with a girl in retail who just could not arrive on time. Even with a 5-minute leniency rule she still couldn’t get there on time. We had a pretty generous tardy system -- 8 tardies in 6 months and then termination after that. We were having pretty high turnover so this girl had more than 10 and no one had said anything to her.

She even admitted she was usually “on time” but would sit in her car and talk on the phone and end up late. Or decide to hit a drive-thru knowing she didn’t have time and end up late.

One day she comes in, late as usual, and immediately gets called to the store manager's office. We assumed she was getting fired but it turned out she was simply getting “warned." In that moment she decided to ask the manager if her tardy from THAT DAY counted. He fired her on the spot.