'The total damage was almost $1,000,000': 20+ People whose giant mistakes got them immediately fired

Author image for Remy Millisky
Remy Millisky • Writer and Editor
Feb 19, 2025 3:00 PM EST

Companies want their employees to feel secure in their jobs, but there is a limit to how many costly mistakes one person can make before they're fired. 

Hiring and firing don't always seem fair. We all know one coworker who simply cannot do anything right, yet has been with the company for like, eight years straight. They can make mistake after mistake without ever seeming to suffer the consequences of their actions. So long as that employee is the CEO's bestie or the secretary's son, that person is all but guaranteed to stay employed for a long while. 

There's definitely a monetary limit to making mistakes while on the clock. This also differs from company to company. At one place, an employee might be fired for snapping at a customer, while at another, a worker would need to make a mistake costing thousands before their job is at stake. 

These people shared the things that got them fired, like one welder who completely ruined a $65,000 door! This person admits that they just weren't very good at welding. By the time their boss showed them that expensive door mistake, this worker already knew they were a goner. Their boss did at least give them a nice chunk of change on their way out the door, which is much nicer than most of the people here who were just let go immediately. 

Up next, read about some employees who went nuts with the company credit card, like one person who "caught a guy trying to buy a $30k boat." 

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    Cheezburger Image 10469777408
    via Getty Images For Unsplash+

    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

  • 02
    Northsidebill1 I worked at Roche as a security guard for a while. One day I was walking the floor of the manufacturing area and was asked to accompany a guy to get a roll of Palladium. Palladium was used to make the test strips that go into bl d glucose meters, its an insanely expensive metal and comes in rolls that cost (at the time) around
    via u/Northsidebill1
  • 03
    $100,000 each. I walked with him to get it and while he was getting the roll off the shelf something happened and three rolls fell into another shelf and a lot of rolls cascaded to the floor. This ruined them. The total damage was almost a million dollars. He wanted to leave right then and avoid the firing but I convinced
    via u/Northsidebill1
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    him he might not get fired since it was an accident. He was gone the next day
    via u/Northsidebill1
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    No_Thisls_Patrick My best friend and I worked together for years at a small sandwich shop. One day we were closing together and we were talking some mad sh about our manager. Just ripping into the guy. We said what we said, had our laugh. as we finished ranting, and I mockingly turned around and said "oh, hey (manager's name)!!" As if he had been there listening to
    via u/No_Thisls_Patrick
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    us the whole time. From down the hall we hear "How'd you know I was here?! I just walked through the door!" Cue us both ourselves at how close we cut it.
    via u/No_Thisls_Patrick

    Hmmm… maybe he did actually hear you and was trying to give you the heads up! 

  • 07
    humayounak An acquaintance once came close to getting fired when he forgot to switch his account and tweeted "Aussies are from his Company's cheats" account.
    via u/humayounak
  • 08

    This story is long, but utterly victorious for the pizza delivery guy!

    ru... I worked at a pizza shop in college as a delivery driver on weekend nights. On this particular weekend, it was one of the biggest sport events of the year and we were slammed. The manager on duty had just switched roles in the company from being a driver and it was his first day acting in that capacity.
    via u/rubyvr00m
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    Having anticipated a rush for the event, we had hired on 3 new employees that also started that week, so they had no idea what they were doing. We were located fairly close to the stadium too, so traffic was nuts. All of this culminated in a lot of messed up orders and deliveries running up to almost 2 hours late.
    via u/rubyvr00m
  • 10
    Of course the new people on the phones keep instinctively telling people 30 minutes or less instead of a more realistic time frame, all my customers are ped. I'm moving as fast as I can, running crazy 6 or 7 stop runs and probably getting stiffed on about half of my orders. I understand why the customers were p ed, getting things an hour late, but I'm still mad they took it out on me as a
    via u/rubyvr00m
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    driver, having only had maybe 15 minutes handling their food before getting it to them. So I show up to one of the last deliveries on my route, to a crummy apartment on the run down side of town. As I approach the door, a woman out front belts out, "it's about I time." So I already know about how this one is going to go. I'm pretty
    via u/rubyvr00m
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    exhausted from a day of ab e already so I just try to apologize for the wait, keep things civil and handle the transaction and that's about where sh hits the fan. I tell her the total for the order which is 17$ and some change. She hands me a 20$. So I ask if she wants change and she does, so I hand her 2$. Now she gets hostile. I explain to her that I don't carry coins and can't
    via u/rubyvr00m
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    give her back the 30 some odd cents that she expects back. That's when she calls me a theif. When I refuted, she started saying how she was going to have me fired and how I should be ashamed of stealing from her and all this sh. I finally just snapped.
    via u/rubyvr00m
  • 14
    I started just berating the woman. Screaming obscenities, insults and curses at her. Her husband came out and joined in the shouting match, so of course I chewed him out too. I put together vulgarities in ways I didn't realize were possible and basically insulted them both like it was a Comedy Central roast.
    via u/rubyvr00m
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    I made my way back to my car and in the strangest mix of emotions I've ever experienced I was cackling and crying at the same time. After just a minute or two back on the road I get a call from the new manager guy asking if I just took a delivery to that person's house and what happened. I give a brief explanation and he asks me to finish my run and come back to the store
    via u/rubyvr00m
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    ASAP to discuss it more thoroughly. That's it, I'm sure, I'm so fired. When I get back he tells me that the lady said I threatened her with a knife which definitely wasn't true. I told them I don't even have a knife or a weapon at all and we basically end up laughing that off, they thought the lady was just
    via u/rubyvr00m
  • 17
    crazy and exaggerating everything. Of course I never admitted to the cursing and what have you, but since she went so far with the accusations they just took my word over hers. At the end of the night, the new manager comes up to me and says "I don't see any reason the head manager needs to hear about this." | didn't even receive so much as a written warning.
    via u/rubyvr00m
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    And I'm not going to lie, as as I was to that lady, it felt really good to let it out like that and get out unscathed.
    via u/rubyvr00m
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    Cheezburger Image 10469778176
    via Curated Lifestyle For Unsplash+

    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

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    ogc ..y I used to work in a warehouse right after high school. Not knowing how everything worked and it being my first real full time job I just did what I was told and tried my best to impress the bosses. One day in the packaging room someone had thrown a screw driver out of anger and it stuck into the drywall. Out of hilarity my manager bet the guy 2
    via u/ogcr****
  • 21
    gas station taquitos he couldn't do it again. This became a daily thing around lunch time. Everyone would gather around and throw screw drivers at the wall and whoever's didn't stick had to buy lunch. Well this was right over a $8,000 heat shrink machine. And guess who accidentally hit the control panel breaking the machine... well one day one of the owners came back
    via u/ogcr****
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    looking for something specific and noticed the bludgeoned wall. Looks at all of us Owner: "so you guys have been throwing screw drivers at the wall?" Me: hangs head "yes" Owner: "that's cool" walks away Never got fired. He was extremely pl ed about the machine I had broke though. He ended up just buying a better one.
    via u/ogcr****
  • 23
    GO... Thought I lost a master key that worked at 6 locations (about 400 doors) that would need re-keying ... 2 weeks into a new job... someone took it off my desk to teach me a lesson about keeping it on my desk and not purring putting it in the key safe
    via u/G0PACKGO
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    [d... When I was a kid, there was a van that used to come and pick us all up from school and take us to daycare. One day all the daycare kids loaded up onto the van and the driver told us that we weren't going to daycare. We were going to her house. Apparently her 12 year old daughter had been told not to get on the school bus that
    via u/[deleted]
  • 25
    day, but to get on the daycare van. She disobeyed and got on the school bus anyway. Her mom was p ed and wanted to meet the school bus at their house to catch her daughter. So while she sat waiting for an hour for the bus to arrive with her daughter, we got to play on her trampoline in the backyard. While all of our parents were trying to figure out why our van hadn't ever
    via u/[deleted]
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    gotten to the daycare. She eventually loaded us up into the van with her daughter and drove us back to the daycare, where police were waiting and parents were crying. It was then that realization dawned on her face that perhaps that wasn't the best thing to do. She lost her job that day.
    via u/[deleted]
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    un7alented Happened at my last workplace. My colleague needed a specific washing machine for a customer. We had a pretty small warehouse for our stuff and it was around christmas time, so you can imagine how much stuff we got in there on top of each other. Anyway, the washing machines were stacked up on top of each other and the
    via u/un7alented
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    one he needed was right at the edge of something that was similar to a pyramide. The gets the fork-lifter and he aims directly at it without thinking about moving the machines on top of it. As you can already imagine, the whole thing collapsed and he basically destroyed a bunch of washing machines, TV's and some other stuff.
    via u/un7alented
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    Our boss rushed in the warehouse and you could tell by the face of my colleague that it said: "I'm fired, right?"
    via u/un7alented
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    Pa... When I graduated high school I got a job as a bellhop at a Marriott. The front desk would transfer all request for direction calls to our phone. First night there by myself and my phone rings, dude says he must be close because he's been driving on Route 78 for 2 hours.
    via u/Pantarus
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    I got confused where he was and turned him around...he drove back the wrong way for an hour before he realized I messed up. He came in furious. Storming over to the bellstand where I was standing.....he says Hi Paul, I'm looking for a moron named Pantarus...that dumb a just gave me the most half-assed directions...he's
    via u/Pantarus
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    incompetent and I need something done about this NOW! Stunned silence...Paul? Why is he calling me Paul? HOLY SH !......PAUL!!!!! totally forgot that because I was so new I had to borrow another bell mans name tag. Sir, we'll handle this immediately. I took out a dry cleaning ticket and wrote
    via u/Pantarus
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    myself up a "disciplinary form" and assured the person that Pantarus is on probation and would be fired immediately. He was happy...tipped me 20 bucks and went on his merry way :)
    via u/Pantarus
  • 34
    worksafemonkey My first day of my first job I rolled a Silverado off a cliff that had under a thousand miles on the odo. I figured I would just go turn in all my stuff and start looking for a new job but my boss was incredibly worried that I was okay, told me not to even worry about the truck and personally took me to the ER to get checked out even though I insisted I was
    via u/worksafemonkey
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    perfectly fine. It was a government contract and Uncle Sam picked up the bill for everything and I worked there for another 16 months.
    via u/worksafemonkey
  • 36
    CaptWeirdBeard Not really a am i fired moment but more of a did he just fire himself moment. I worked for a company that used a point system when it comes to missed days of work. You got 6 points in 6 months and you were let go (1 point for call in, .5 for being late up to 4 hours). It was a factory that made plastic pallets and it would
    via u/CaptWeirdBeard
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    get really hot in the summer so they were always looking for new people. About a year before i was fired (not for missed work) a guy started who went to the same high school i did but was about 4 years younger. Lets call him Marty. After talking to him for 5 minutes you could tell he was not too smart. He called in quite a bit to get up to 5 points and on his warning before being fired.
    via u/CaptWeirdBeard
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    One day he comes in hungover in the middle of summer. Before we even got to the floor he was talking about going home. An hour after the start of our shift, myself and the guy i was working with watch Marty walk into the managers office and out again in like 5 minutes. Our boss then follows him out of the office with a confused look on his face. Our boss walks Marty
    via u/CaptWeirdBeard
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    out of the plant and is making his way back to his office when my co-worker and i stop him to ask what happened. Apparently Marty went into his office and said he couldn't work and was going home. The boss said if he did he would get fired. Marty ok, see you tomorrow and started to leave. Boss man said most of the time spent in the office was trying to explain to Marty what being fired meant. Its
    via u/CaptWeirdBeard
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    stuff like this that i kinda miss that place.
    via u/CaptWeirdBeard
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    PM_Me_Food_stu... I used to work in a call center for a supplemental insurance firm. One day I was making enrollment calls to employees of one of our clients, making sure to leave voicemails if they did not pick up so they can call back. One of these calls kept cutting me off mid- voicemail and prompting to press 1 to leave a voicemail, I assumed their voicemail
    via u/PM_Me_Food_stuffs
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    wasn't actually recording as to why it kept cutting me off. After several attempts on leaving a voicemail, I just exclaimed "Son of a bl !", and hung up. An hour goes by and the president of my company calls me into his office with the call center manager. Turns out that person's voicemail was recording the entire time and had all of the audio.
    via u/PM_Me_Food_stuffs
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    Even worse, it was the voicemail box of the CEO of our client company that I was calling. He literally played the audio in front of us, it was hard to explain my way out of that one.
    via u/PM_Me_Food_stuffs
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    fudgeman Happened to a coworker of mine. I work at a bagel factory and we have this long bagel stick for picking up multiple bagels and transferring them to the bagel staging area. Well, this coworker loved bagels and loved scooping bagels with the bagel stick even more and I think you know where this is heading, so one shift, he takes one bagel stick and
    via u/fudgeman
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    duct tapes it to another bagel stick for a super bagel stick and starts sticking it through bagel bagel hole after bagel hole until there's just way to many bagels to handle and I tried to tell him there were too many bagels on that thing and that a bagel stick can't handle the weight of that many bagels and then a few other bagel factory workers gathered around with worry in their
    via u/fudgeman
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    eyes as a my ex-coworker delicately balanced the bagels on the bagel stick and slowly raised it in the air like a bagel tower and he did look like he was in over his head as the bagels on the bagel stick and he was trying to head towards the bagel staging area but then
    via u/fudgeman
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    the bagel stick gave way and bagels topple everywhere and a lot of bagels bounced into some critical bagel production equipment and then he fell over because he tripped on some bagels and we all just looked at him and he knew his bagel factory days were over.
    via u/fudgeman
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    [deleted] Coworker while being caught not preforming count procedures at a prison. All that was required of the officer was to walk past 84 cells and confirm breathing bodies. Rank comes down to see where count was, finds coworker sleeping in supply closet (attempts to wake/jigger having already failed). Rank then finds the
    via u/[deleted]
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    officer's already completed count sheet in his lap, meaning it was filled out in advance, which is grounds to be immediately fired. Coworker just hangs his head and starts grabbing his belongings before bring escorted out.
    via u/[deleted]
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    This story is insane

    Ace-holeRimmer When I was working day shift behind the bar in an Irish bar/restaurant in France, a waitress brought a table of 2 their food, they were having different burgers, and the waitress never verified who was having what before putting the plates down. She went off to take another order, and the first table called her back to say that she put the
    via u/Ace-holeRimmer
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    wrong plates in front of them, and she needed to switch them. She stared at them for a moment, I could see the wheels in her head turning, and she just grabbled the burgers, not the plates, and switched them, looked the customer de d in the eye and said "bon appetit" and walked off. The place was, and remains, an absolute shitshow, as far as treatment
    via u/Ace-holeRimmer
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    of staff goes, everyone was constantly stressed and on their toes, and the running "joke" was to tell new staff that if they did something wrong they would be held accountable and punished, and if they didnt do anything wrong, well, they would be punished anyway. All that to say, when she came over to the bar again, all i could think to say to her was "that was funny, but you know youre fired, right?"
    via u/Ace-holeRimmer

    Why… why would she do that? Why wouldn't she just flip the plates? I guess she was acting instinctually, and just let her wildest impulses win out instead of displaying proper server etiquette. 

  • 53
    dbatchison I was the third key who locked up for the night at a coffee shop. I'd clean the place and put away this crock pot on top of the freezer for the night. One night, the power cord from the crock pot shut in the freezer door when I left. The door popped open during the night and all it's contents melted out on the floor :(
    via u/dbatchison
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    Olazzarus I was in a meeting with some coworkers, the boss, and this new lady from another agency. She starts throwing out buzzwords like "proactive" and "paradigm" and I say "aren't those words that dumb people use to sound important?. Not that i'm accusing you of anything like that." I was fired on the spot.
    via u/Olazzarus
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    Optimized_Orang... I was working as a manager for a parking garage at a hospital in my early 20's. Supervising the valet crew was part of my job. A lot of the valet guys were either 20 somethings without much direction or 60+ guys working a job in semi- retirement. One of the older fellas mistook the gas pedal for the brake while trying to drive a heavily modified
    via u/Optimized_Orangutan
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    transport bus (modified with lifts, gurney strapping points, etc.) he totaled 6 cars before the bus finally came to a stop... I ran towards it thinking he was probably hurt... before I got. there he hopped out of the bus, shook his head and looked at me "Soooo... I'm probably fired. Right?". I don't remember what the final total was on the insurance claim... but yes, he was fired.
    via u/Optimized_Orangutan
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    KingKingsons My boss hadn't paid me for over 2 months, so at one point I demanded the money to be on my bank account by the next day, or else I'd sue them. My I received my final pay the next day and I got rid of that awful job at the same time.
    via u/KingKingsons
  • 58
    EkriirkE I spoke out in a "clearing meeting - its a safe space" about all the upper level hiring and blatant lack of promotions coming from a consultant who was hand- picking all these new hires. I was fired a couple weeks later for unclear reasons
    via u/EkriirkE
  • 59
    J2501 At the time, my job was testing the front end of a large billing database. Manager told me to test on Beta. At the time, I thought of Beta as a staging environment with mock data, not an alternative front end to our production database (which it never should have been).
    via u/J2501
  • 60
    When I test, I always use obviously fake numbers. So here I am, in a production DB, making bills, and anyway, the next week a real life customer wanted to know why he had a bill for $420.69. Surprisingly, I didn't get fired. At that point.
    via u/J2501
  • 61
    Pa... I made a change to our McAfee account where I applied the EEPC (endpoint encryption) tag to all computers that didn't have it (I had been forgetting to do so as I was going and wanted to cover my tracks).
    via u/Panda_Sa***
  • 62
    Two weeks later my boss. asked who was making changes, and when I confessed she said "Congratulations, you just encrypted our SQL servers!" Fuuuuuuuck me....
    via u/Panda_Sa***
  • 63
    [deleted] I went off on our manager in a meeting, like repressed emotions for years and years went off.
    via u/[deleted]
  • 64
    sskybanditt She accidentally started to delete the law firms entire database and didn't tell anyone about it. What got her fired is that she wouldn't fully say what happened. Even if her story was 100% true there's no way of fully believing her because she constantly makes up excuses for when she messes up, nothing was ever her fault.
    via u/sskybanditt
  • 65
    I really feel bad but apparently our boss had other issues with her so this just made him not want her here anymore. This happened yesterday and we have two people interviewing today.
    via u/sskybanditt
  • 66
    finnyboy665 Boss came to me one day. He says we wants to show me something. He shows me a gate I've welded badly. This wasn't the first one I had messed up without realising it and i could tell he was going to shout at me about it. All I said was 'am i gone then?', and he said
    via u/finnyboy665
  • 67
    yes. In fairness to him, I was given two weeks notice and a huge chunk of unclaimed holiday pay as well. My last. payslip had over a grand before tax on it.
    via u/finnyboy665
  • 68
    twiztedterry I have two: 1. I worked for a call center doing telemarketing for a few years, had a call that was a little out of the ordinary, I talked to my supervisor to get permission to proceed with the call given the unique circumstances.
    via u/twiztedterry
  • 69
    Boss gave me the go-ahead, I made the sale. Two days later, I'm called into the managers office, she's in there with the company legal team. I walked in, she asked me to close the door in a very stern voice. Turns out, my Boss was involved in some pretty shady practices, and the
    via u/twiztedterry
  • 70
    client had listened to my call. I was laid off, my boss was terminated and legal action. taken against him. 2) When I worked fast food, we had a customer order a chicken sandwich, no mayo. The cook was making it and forgot that it was no mayo, the customer saw him put
    via u/twiztedterry
  • 71
    mayo on it and corrected him, again confirming that it was no mayo. The manager was at the counter with me, the cook was in the back "Fixing" the sandwich, when he decided to use a WET CLEANING RAG to wipe the Mayo off the bun and keep making the sandwich.
    via u/twiztedterry
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    The customer saw this and was rightfully upset. The manager saw what happened and fired the cook on the spot, then took the cook's spot in the kitchen. The very next day, I began training to be a cook :D
    via u/twiztedterry
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    UmbraeAccipiter The intern came in dr nk and started arguing with a manager... Security was called... He puked on the security guard... then fell over and passed out.
    via u/UmbraeAccipiter
  • 74
    He was taken away by ambulance. E-mail was sent out the next day that he had been let go... The kicker, he only had 4 more days left on the internship. Don't celebrate the end till it is over folks.
    via u/UmbraeAccipiter
  • 75
    [deleted] At my last workplace there was a literal emergency button that shut off the servers. It was a financial company and I worked in IT. One night a worker pressed the button (not sure if it could have been accidental, it was pretty well labeled)
    via u/[deleted]
  • 76
    and like half the IT department had to drive in in the middle of the night to fix it. People were VERY p ed the next morning. None of the managers would give out the name of the person though, for obvious reasons, so no one knew if they got fired or not.
    via u/[deleted]
  • 77
    onetwofiver Dropping 160 degree oil on my managers head. It must have been my second month. Not good.
    via u/onetwofiver
  • 78
    Pudgy_Ninja At my last firm, I made a mistake that basically cost $30k. The partner chewed me out a bit and showed me how I had f ed up, but then at the end, he just said, "Now I bet you'll never make that mistake again." Basically he figured that they taught me a very expensive lesson - might as well get their money's worth.
    via u/Pudgy_Ninja
  • 79
    Doopsy My first day welding professionally. I ruined a $65000 door. Told my boss. abd showed him the issue. I just looked st his face abd said "I'll go grab my tools, thanks for the chance to work for you" he just laughed and told me to grab the prints and start building a new door. We ended up fixing the door.
    via u/Doopsy

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getting fired firing story firing fired fired story bosses laid off mistakes fired on spot employees Horrible Bosses got fired
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