20+ Managers who were stuck with the worst employees: 'She thought it was perfectly okay to just take a nap'

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    'She was just... totally untrainable. I've never been so happy to see someone fired' M FAMOUS
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    autumngust When I was a shift manager at Starbucks, I had a few shifts with a wretched middle aged woman. She would eat pastries on the clock when I wasn't looking, constantly grab a broom and wander around doing nothing much, or do literally nothing if she wasn't told to do otherwise. She was passive aggressive and was not incapable of talking
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    down to others. I was relieved when I found out that she was leaving. Or was she fired for absence? Anyways. I didn't know much about her, but a job ought to inspire the best out of people. I don't ever want to be the kind of person who works like her.
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    Booker DeWittsCa... When I was younger I managed a Borders bookstore. During the holidays we also had a calendar kiosk in the shopping center our store was a part of. Staffing it was always a nightmare. They were seasonal temps for a job that was incredibly boring and tedious so we didn't get the best. It wasn't a hard job though. Watch
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    the stock, restock anything that gets low, ring up customers. That's basically it. I hired one woman who seemed okay enough. I trained her one morning in early November when it was slow and then left her on her own for a bit. A few hours later a customer came into the bookstore and said no one was at the calendar kiosk and she wanted to buy
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    a calendar. I apologized profusely and walked down to the kiosk to see what the h I was going on. I found half the calendars stolen and the woman ASLEEP behind the tarps that hid the extra stock. I was LIVID. I woke her up and demanded to know what the h I she was doing. She was completely unable to see what she had done was wrong. She said the job was
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    boring, no one had bought anything all day, and she was tired because she had a long night. She thought it was perfectly okay to just take a nap. I immediately fired her and she got angry at ME for it! I still get angry thinking about it, all these years later. What the absolute F was she thinking?
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    airwalkerdnbmusic Hired a young dude who was on jobseekers to help on the neighbours farm. 5am start, everyday, including weekends. One day off whenever you wanted as long as you give us 12 hours notice. Hard but easy work. From day one this guy was bewilderingly incompetent. Sweep out the barn. It should only take you half an
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    hour then come and help us unload the food pallets from the delivery truck. Its fetch and carry stuff. So he comes running back to us after 15 minutes asking for help. Wut? You need help sweeping a barn? I decided to go look just incase hes done something daft. Yup. Hes managed to sweep hay and cow sh into the drinking troughs for the
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    animals. How....how do you even do that? Ill give him the benefit of the doubt I said. Go and change the water, tip this out down the drain and sweep the hay and sh into a bucket and chuck it on the manure pile at the bottom of the yard over there, then finish sweeping the barn out, all of the old hay and sh needs to be swept into a pile and then into the wheelbarrow
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    and onto the manure pile at the bottom of the garden. Half an hour passes. Just what the h l is this guy doing? Hes fishing the bits of straw and sh out of the drinking trough very carefully, with his bare hands, despite us giving him gloves.
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    Sorry son, best be off with you now. Heres £20, good luck to you.
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    000-000-000yea I was supposed to be the manager of a group of engineers for a specific technology. I was your classic "stupidvisor" and the guy who was the actual manager was an old cranky but was atleast lazy so f I had pretty good respect from my group except for this old guy who we will call syed.
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    They had this rule that if we had any job on the west coast syed had to do it, no matter how much the customer hated this guy, or how wrong his advise was, or how unethical he was. Whenever a customer had a question Syed had to go to site to go collect data... but he would never report anything.... I don't think he even went to site, he just took advantage of my stupid manager.
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    The kicker is that Syed decided to bring his wife with him on a trip which is fine... but decided to bring her with him to an oil field and pose her as an employee of the company. He actually tried bringing her on the field to take notes. The client was furious sense she had no PPE, no safety training, no NDA's, no nothing.
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    I complained and said he is not going on any more trips. Old crusty manager for some reason didn't care (whenever we spend money he would get super p ed). This guy also couldn't do basic engineering tasks like read Piping and Instrumention Diagrams or PFD's. I actually quit working this job on Tuesday, and am enjoying being unemployed!
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    Pu... Had a coworker who fell for the whole delete system32 to make computer faster trick. We're in IT.
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    Reddit_at_work91 I inherited a team when I took on a new position this year. In general, a really good bunch of people, apart from one who we'll call Marie. Marie was close personal friends with my predecessor, having followed her through several different companies, and was in effect to be 'my number 2'. My boss, the CFO told me on day 1 to
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    make sure Marie sticks around, as she's a 'Diamond Employee'. Marie worked remotely, but I asked her to come in for an introductory team meeting during my first week. She arrived and promptly hands in her notice. Ok, fine, I was sort of expecting she wouldn't stay around too long, and as it turned out she has now followed my predecessor into another
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    new venture. For the past six months, me and the team have been correcting all of Marie's mistakes. Nearly every project she headed up has been riddled with errors, some have cost 10's of thousands of pounds over the past 18 months.
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    It turned out my predecessor and Marie had basically been doing whatever the hol they wanted during their tenure, whilst fabricating positive results higher up the chain. A mess which now I'm having to clean up. LL F Marie.
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    mack_daddy9249 Introduced flame retardant jackets to employees who were working around highly flammable materials. Employee thought (or lack of thought) to try out the retardant aspect on the production floor by opening the jacket and trying to burn it with a lighter. Ripped the guy off the floor and threw him in my office. After cooling a bit, threw out the
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    question 'you tried to light yourself on fire, what do you think of yourself?' to see how he would self reflect from that perspective aside from risking other workers. His response is that phrased in that manner, it makes him sound like an idiot. I agreed and called him an idiot and welcomed him to report it to HR while he's leaving.
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    MrNatural_20 Had an intern who was sleeping in their cube while I was busy in a regular meeting. I found out just shy of the end of their internship. Turned out everyone thought I knew, despite the meeting being well-known to occupy me. It wasn't worth the paperwork to toss them out on their ear with two weeks left, so I decided to simply make sure
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    they understood this sh would not fly so well in the real world. During the discussion I learned they were having problems staying awake because they had "decided to stop eating all protein, because it's bad for you." I'm not saying they just got rid of meat, or even meat, milk, and eggs -- no, they'd decided beans and tofu were bad, too.
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    I'm still not sure how to respond to that.
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    SilentStrix When I was a DSP, I had the displeasure of training someone who I'm not sure even got hired. Refused to cook for the clients.
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    Didn't know how to read medication administration records. Refused to clean. Refused to help bathe clients.
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    This person's situation is infuriating because higher-ups refused to take their side

    ashleypatience I had a couple. They were all best friends and hung out after work probably making voodoo dolls of myself and sharing their nightmare stories of their satan boss who lived and breathed to make their lives awful. 1. I had to ask each of these three girls not to be on their phones at separate times, their
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    responses: A: So when i'm clocked in you control me? I'm no longer allowed to be myself? K: Ever since you became a manager you aren't fun anymore and no one likes you. I dread coming to work because everything has to be by the rules for you. These girls were lazy, gossiped, and talked about
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    everyone. I heard them talk about EACH OTHER constantly. All 3 no longer work there but neither do I. My boss never backed me up and wrote me up for being yelled at by one of them. My only 2 write ups ever as a manager for 2 years was 1. coming to help with a partner who was harassing me (who was later
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    fired for harassment) and 2. being yelled at on the floor. I was told, "I need to hold both parties accountable." Being a lower level manager means nothing if the higher ups don't support you.
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    DLS3141 I ran a small test lab (one of many) in a major appliance manufacturer's tech center and I "inherited", lets call him "Tim", from another lab in the company when another tech center in another state was eliminated. Tim wasn't a direct employee, he had been hired through a temp agency to work at the now closed tech center and had
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    moved halfway across the country at his own expense, which I thought was strange, but whatever. First day on the job, he asks me for a timeline when he'll be hired permanently, because he'd been promised a direct position after 3 years with the company and it had been 2 years and 8 months. I had to tell him that whoever made that promise shouldn't have
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    and that I couldn't make any guarantee that a direct position would ever open up for him, but that I would help him however I could. He'd been working in an electronics test lab, but my lab didn't test electronics, we did transportation and handling tests, meaning we froze, dropped, hit, squeezed and shook already packaged products to make sure they'd survive the trip
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    from the factory to the customer. So rather than mostly sitting on his a testing circuit boards, Tim has to move appliances around the lab from test station to test station, more physical work but we have carts, mechanical lifts and other work aids to help. After a week, Tim claims his back hurts so I have to get my other two techs to pick up the slack and Tim gets to write reports. I tell HR, they
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    want him to rest for a week, then go to the doctor. Tim declines the doctor's visit and magically gets better. Then a few weeks later the same thing happens, HR sends him straight to the doctor, gets a prescription and a note for 2 weeks of light duty. OK, whatever. Some variation of this goes on sporadically throughout the duration of Tim's employment.
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    Then, one morning I get a call from the director of HR to come down to the HR office immediately. I know this isn't good, but I have no idea what it's about. He ushers me into his office, my boss is waiting in there and the director starts interrogating me about Tim's activities outside of work and asking if I knew anything about some online business he had. I had no idea what they were talking
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    about and I guess that, along with the look of total confusion on my face was enough to convince them that I wasn't involved, evidently this is despite Tim's insistence that I knew everything. Then they filled me in on what had happened. Tim was involved with some multi-level marketing spinoff of Amway (called Goldstar I think) that sold energy
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    drinks, protein powders, vitamins and cereal bars online. Evidently there were several employees in other buildings involved as well. Evidently, one of the things they like to do is stage "celebrations" when someone starts making enough money to leave their regular job to focus entirely on their online MLM gig. What they would do is hire a limo and get a bunch of
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    people to gather outide the lucky person's place of employment, hold up signs and cheer when the person comes out after their last day on the job, gets in the limo and is whisked off in luxury to their new life pursuing ever greater riches or whatever. It looks like a cross between a strike, riot, a political protest and when the happy couple exit the church after getting married. They would film these
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    events and then use the footage at their conventions to encourage people to keep going. The day before, at the building next door, one of these events had been planned for an employee on her last day. It did NOT go over as they'd hoped. They had 30-40 people gathered outside the front door of the building, holding signs, chanting and carrying on.
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    The security guard has no idea what the H I is going on and following protocol, locks the building down, which immediately sounds an alarm and calls 911. (I saw video from the security cameras and the "protesters" were being pretty rowdy, I can see why the guard hit the "oh sh button). No one can enter or exit the building through the front doors. All of the police show up within a few
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    minutes and get things sorted out, but it takes a while and Tim is one of several employees caught up in the fray. The police don't arrest anyone and Tim just takes his sign, gets in his car and goes home. Comes into work the next day like nothing happened and almost immediately gets pulled into HR where he implicates me and the other technicians in his scam.
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    After my little interrogation, we all go into another conference room where Tim is sitting with two people from the contract/temp agency where we're joined by two giant security guards. We tell the contract agency people that Tim is no longer welcome to work for us, they in turn tell Tim he's terminated for cause and security escorts him out to his car.
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    Cheezburger Image 10470519808
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    [de... My last company had a year- long hiring and firing freeze, which included evaluating all expenses including travel. Meaning, I couldn't hire anyone new in that time period, or fire anyone, and if I needed to travel for work, I had to get it approved by multiple people above me... Well, the problem is, everyone at the company knew this because it
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    happened after a major layoff, so employees who were still there felt invincible that any poor performance wouldn't cause them to lose their job. The company just wanted to stabilize and have a strong year in terms of revenue and resource headcount... One employee in particular became the biggest pain in my a because of this. I documented everything
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    though as I have to run my team's annual reviews. Employee showed up late to work 35 times over the year. I'm talking 1-3 hours late, not like 10 min... They'd "make up" for those hours by staying late but the thing is, everyone would leave at 5 pm so it left me with an added responsibility to make sure they were sticking around after hours to work, cutting into my personal life. Every time was a different
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    BS excuse but at least once every week or every other week... They had a negative PTO balance which sparked an HR issue as it was being counted as time theft as it was greater than 3 days' worth of time (PTO typically had to be requested in advance but 'sick days' became more and more frequent, and we did not have a 'work from home' option, so if you called out sick, that was using a PTO
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    vacation day). The person constantly wasted time on YouTube & Facebook too. The person was disrespectful to everyone, including myself. Person embarrassed me at the company's holiday party by getting so drink that they needed to be carried to a cab to get home (another HR meeting happened because of that). Towards the end of the year, they talked about getting a better
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    job elsewhere from one of their friend's dad's connections who was a high-up employee at a competitor company (I was hoping they would leave on their own), and once even took an interview at their cubicle which was about 5 seats away from me... They were a terrible worker though so I just kept documenting everything knowing this would all be viewed by HR and decisions
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    would be out of my hands. after the fact... But, worst of all was the performance, was at the bottom of the ranking list in terms of actually working compared to all of the peers in the department. Awful year. As a Manager I was helpless to cause change in this employee because the consequence of firing them was off the table at the time...
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    Well, after the hiring & firing freeze ended and we had annual reviews, about 10% of my department was set to be laid off including this employee. Every 2-3 years there was typically a lay off period... The employee then filed "anonymous complaints" against multiple people in our department so even after being laid off, had to go to a series of additional HR meetings to basically dispute all the
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    negative things said. Those meetings turn the anonymity button off. Person flat out lied about everything. Luckily, had documented everything and had everything in their annual review so no further actions were taken. Then a few weeks later, I get a call from a different company as this person had listed me as one of their references. They were in the
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    interview process and they were asking me about this employee's performance, attitude, accountability, etc. I was floored. How are you going to be a pain in my a for a year, file complaints about your peers & leadership when you off for your own poor performance, and then still list those bosses as your professional work references for a new job? I
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    have managed probably 30 different employees over 6- 7 years and only 1 ever gave me any trouble. Never hope to cross paths with them again...
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    [de... I was a shift at Wendy's. He watched the instructional videos, we did four corner training, we gave him time to acclimate. The guy could not do a thing right after months. I'm not talking slow or unmotivated, I mean he showed up bright eyed and bushy tailed every day happy to be at his job, and then failed to do anything.
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    Dropping grilled chicken in the fryer after multiple corrections, leave the freezer door ajar after multiple corrections, the sink water was usually tan in color with food floating around in it. Mind you the dishes are usually where worthless people go and he somehow made his peers look amazing. It got to the point where if Chris was standing in the hallway with
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    a torn bag and chicken on the floor while flames are coming out of the oven it was an average or even good day. Night shift became "clean up after Chris shift". He's still there, I'm not.
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    Team-Mako-N7 I had an employee for two and a half weeks. The owner of the company liked her in the interview. They bonded over hating the same things and how the quality at certain establishments had just gone down in recent years. I didn't want to hire her. I thought she was really negative, and I got the
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    impression that she would struggle with the computer, just based on a few things she said. The owner hired her over my objections. It was even worse than I imagined it could be. She was between 10 and 50 minutes late every single day, with a variety of different excuses. She was almost completely incapable of using a computer, despite her supposed background in
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    graphic design. She struggled with the concept of doing quotes, invoices, and purchase orders. And she never learned anything. She just took more and more detailed notes until she could follow her notes. I could go on for days about her. She took at least twice as long as anyone else to do the same job. She asked the same questions every day (unless she wrote the
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    answers down). She was just a complete failure, totally untrainable. I've never been so happy to see someone fired.
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    [deleted] Shift supervisor at a Wendy's. It was a close and everyone had to pick up some extra work so the could install a freestyle machine at the drive thru window. Anyway the one closer refuses to do any of the extra work so I end up writing him up. Fast forward a couple months and I had to write him up again for something similar. After that
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    I heard him mumble something about stopping by my apartment (I have on street parking, a couple weeks prior he was driving around and recognized my car and saw me leave the apartment). The next day I wake up and my car and front porch were covered in eggs. A few months after this incident he no called/no showed and it was probably one if the happiest days of my life.
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    TLDR: Disgruntled employee found out where I lived and egged me after I had written him up.
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    [deleted] Wow so I have this one employee from Armenia who is terrible. I really don't understand it because he has a degree in accounting and used to work in the field in Armenia, but his German isn't very good so he works under me for minimum wage in a food production facility. But this dude is dumb. At first I thought it was the language barrier, but by now
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    I can tell it's really not. I'll tell him to do one thing and he'll nod a lot and when I check up on him 30 minutes later (because at this point I have to), he's doing something completely else. I'll ask him again to do the thing and he'll say ok. Sometimes I even ask him to repeat it back to me. Then I go back and he's still doing the other thing! His excuse is always that he wanted to
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    finish what he started. When his shift is over, he usually just leaves. As I go to close up, I'll see that he never bothered up cleaning up the communal work area. He just worked up until his shift was over and then bailed. We've talked about this, but he kept doing it so now I've started telling him directly to start cleaning up 30 mins before the end of his shift. Then I come back
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    ten minutes later and he's still not cleaning. It takes him 2.5 hours to make a batch of our product. It takes me 45 minutes, and our other employees an hour. Our ingredients are on shelves with labels showing where everything goes. Without fail, after his shift, things are all mixed up.
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    He constantly writes down his hours on our timecards 2 hours short. I think this is due to trouble with the German 24 hour system. If he works till 6pm, he writes down that he worked until 16:00. I correct it when I notice, but want to get paid? don't you He's also super protective (and to the annoyance) of our female employees. If they're lifting something
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    heavy, he will literally it away from them, ignoring his own job and also their protests. They complain to me about this and other stuff like him dropping everything to open a door for them or other stuff that decrease his productivity. He's not creepy, btw. The reasons why I haven't fired him: he moved to Germany with his family
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    because his young daughter has very severe epilepsy and they couldn't get treatment for it in Armenia. This is his only job and it's only about 30 hours a month anyway. He's also super duper nice and friendly.
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    DootMasterFlex Took over as a Store Manager at a Lids where the previous manager didn't give a sh about anything (think about scoring a 18% on an audit). He hired people who he thought seemed "cool" with literally O qualifications. It was Shane. Shane wouldn't do anything. Wouldn't greet customers,
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    couldn't even be bothered to make eye contact with most of them unless they were pretty girls. Didn't really know how to run the till, didn't know how to run the embroidery machine, didn't know how to stock the shelves, nothing. I blame
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    most of it on the old manager for not holding him accountable and not properly training him, but it was the most pathetic thing I've seen. I started training him throughout my time there and he actually became a pretty decent employee. Still wasn't very confident with a lot of things, but he was actually one of the better employees once I left 5 months later.
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    It's astounding how poorly thought-out this employee's plan was

    earnedmystripes I used to be an asst manager for a company owned cell phone store. My first week there I had an employee on his lunch break and the store got busy so I got on his register and helped customers. After I was done I noticed his drawer needed change so I went to the safe and made change for him.
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    When he got back from lunch he looked at his register and went off wantnig to know who touched his drawer. I looked right at him and said "I did. I made change for you." He calmed down but a little while later I have an email
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    pop up from him that said "STAY THE F OFF MY REGISTER." I was just stunned at the sheer stupidity of it all. I called my boss who then escalated it to HR. They told me to send him home. He was fired 3 days later.
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    p ship462 At a restaurant, there was this one server I could not stand. She would constantly go missing during service, had no idea how to handle customers or complaints, always making mistakes. She would also constantly show up late, and I'm not talking 10/15 minutes late, I'm talking 1-2 hours late.
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    And always with the lamest excuse like, "Sorry, I was at the beach and didn't see the time." ?? But the owner felt bad for her for whatever reason and I couldn't get rid of her (he had a habit of hiring/keeping charity cases). After a few months she got a new job at another restaurant and I was so happy to be rid of her....
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    until she gets fired from that job and begs my boss for her job back. F ! Nothing had changed with her behavior so I tried just scheduling her 1 or 2 nights a week, until she complained to my boss and I had to put her on for every night she was available. Luckily she only lasted a couple more months till she moved on.
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    Shadowheart321 College kids who don't realize that they're not there because I just want to pay them. They're there because I need their help to run a successful business.
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    cerem86 Will. Will was hired on by the owner, I trained him, and we put him in charge of our satellite store. Where he immediately stole half our stock and began pocketing the money he got for most of his jobs. We noticed that the income of that location dropped and pulled him back to the main store. I
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    wanted to fire him, owner retrained him and sent him back. Same thing. This happened FOUR TIMES MORE before the owner caught him red handed stealing a $200 piece of equipment on the security camera and fired him.

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