'Dude was fired on the spot': 20+ Food service workers who got fired for their huge mistakes

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    "[Kitchen workers], what are the dumbest things you've seen people do and get fired over?"

    WakingOwl1 Kids first day, had maybe been on the clock half an hour, spills ice on the floor, picks it up and throws it back in the machine.
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    hotmarhotmar New giyu doing dishes when we were shorthanded on a busy catering weekend. Head chefs running around making sure everything is going smooth, not actively making the food cus he's doing everything else and has our whole crew doing things. The dude who's busy in the dishpit starts calling.
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    out the head chef for "not doing sh "they argue and the dude takes the dish hose and blasts the head chef. Dude was fired on the spot. Then had to wait outside for a ride from his Grandma. Also asked to a smoke from me while he waited.
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    flyart A server bragged about putting Visine in someone's food. Other server ratted him out to the GM. Fired post haste.
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    canuevendoubleh... We had this alc ic dude at my dad's diner. Pretty fast, organized, clean when not drinking, but that was like 20% of the time. Anyways, homie came in and was supposed to take some steaks out to thaw earlier in the day, but forgot. Get an order later and were sold out of thawed steaks.
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    My man grabs a steak ice cube from the freezer, microwaves it for like 30 seconds, then drops it in the deep fryer for a minute, then puts a nice diamond patern on it on the grill. Steak comes back still frozen solid lolololololol
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    Dude was hammered, my dad had enough. My dad's cursed me out in greek many times, but this time he cursed him with words I didn't understand or had ever heard before. God i miss that restaurant.
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    _Batteries_ Guy got fired because a server brought him a drink in an actual glass while he was in the can. Came back, didn't even know the drink was there, Chef walks by with the GM "See, this is the type of sh I'm talking about. Zero tolerance. Hey, you, you're fired"
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    Different guy, different place. Guy named Tim lived with a guy named Goose. Tims at work, dont remember what he did. P ed off the day sous anyway.
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    "F , I'm sick of this sh Tim, you're fired" Then, about 30 seconds later "Tell Goose he's fired too, f that guy" Poor guy wasnt even working that day.
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    casmd21 A busboy ate a piece of celery from the salad station and the gm fired him on the spot.
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    thevyrd This bartender was working at the place for 15+ years. Well liked, customers recognized him. Worked good with the kitchen. Wasnt your typical bartender Seemed like a decent guy. One night a customer walks out on a tab. It was like $10 if that. Bartender goes after the guy. Chases him down
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    the street, across the road, into the parking lot of the beach park. Yelling at the customer the whole time. Picks up a piece of driftwood and is stopped by a coworker that followed him out before he could start going at the customer with driftwood. Over $10. It was the manny's and fries that broke the camels back | guess.
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    At the same place, a problem cook got fired for arguing with a server about an extra tortilla for an order of tacos. Customer wanted a plain extra tortilla. Cook equated it to his raise. Said he can't give out food for free or he gets fired. Started yelling and slamming his fryer baskets. Chef fired him, cook ran out his nine lives. The torilla was like 2 cents.
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    Same place again. These three brothers are servers. Oldest brother is married to another server. They are like 30+, have a kid together. So a busser gets hired, 18 year old and kinda dumb. Wore his polos a little tight, showed off his baby arms. Oldest brothers wife starts hitting on the busser. Front of house gunna front of house and busser and wife start behind the oldest brothers back. Word
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    gets out. Wife quits, oldest brother transfers to a different location, younger brothers make a plan to f up the busser. Busser gets fired for his own safety basically. Jerry springer sh Whole family flipped upside down over some 18 year olds baby arms in a polo shirt.
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    Beginning-Force1... The dude didn't get fired for this, but the kid with a cut reminded me of it. I'd started to make the lemonade one day and a bunch of tables come in at once, so I handed it off to this new kid who is not table- or even window-ready yet. As I'm re-entering the kitchen later I see him wince, very clearly in
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    reaction to touching lemon juice. Somewhat alarmed, I said, "Do you have a cut?" He goes, "No." I'm looking at him skeptically and decide to try, "Do you have any kind of injury that hurts when you touch the lemon juice?"
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    He goes, "It was just a hangnail, but I pulled it off before I started." So help me g-d. The kid even tried to argue when we told him he needed to put on a bandaid and gloves, because, as he kept repeating, it was "just a hangnail."
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    Apparently we need to change the food safety rules. Just tell them from the jump that you need to put a bandage on any part of your hand that hurts when you touch lemon juice.
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    Dangerous_Poun... Saw a guy sitting on the conveyor belt at Amazon. I never saw him again
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    W3R3Hamster Ski resort short order restaurant, idiot kid is working salads because he's not very useful on the actual line and who TF gets a salad at a ski resort. Older woman goes up to order a salad, he asks her the normal things then out of nowhere...
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    "Would you like spit in it?" "Excuse me?!" "With or without spit?" "You're done here." He absolutely was done because that was one of the higher up executive's wife.
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    theFooMart Guy shows up to his shift about 20 minutes early wearing torn up skate shoes, so I told him to go home and get his non slip shoes. I could literally see his house. from out front door so it's not like he had to spend $30 each way to take a cab. But he just never came back that day. This was enough for me to finally let him go. He had
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    a habit of being late and calling in with stupid excuses, sometimes he wouldn't even work one shift in a week. And yet he was still shocked that we fired him.
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    There was the other guy who was just dumb. The order could be a bacon cheeseburger with only ketchup on it, and he'd want to give them a double hamburger with lettuce and tomato. It was like he thought that as long as it was kinda similar, that nobody would notice anything.
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    exubrantraptor dude worked the fryers and his girlfriend was a bartender. this was at a restaurant downtown in a major city so there are a lot of restaurants close to each other. anyways dude disappeared in the middle of dinner service along with his girlfriend after being there not even an hour. we found
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    them an hour later having dinner at a bar across the street while still clocked in. this same dude also dropped a thermometer in the fryer once and just left it in there. the only reason he told someone is because he thought it was the funniest thing ever.
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    Daisy DoodleBug23 I had to fire a cook for dropping an entire sheet pan of baked salmon portions on the floor and then picking them up off the floor and trying to serve them. She didn't even try to hide it.
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    ItsArgon Line cook, one of my best friends actually, refused to cut a Philly in half after a table requested it and the server put it on the ticket. KM and assistant GM are both back there now just asking him to cut the sandwich
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    Dude goes "No f that it's a Philly you don't eat a Philly sandwich cut in half that's bulls I'll give them a knife and they can cut it themselves I'm not doing it for them" Dude was gone on the spot
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    Oily_Bee Dude got caught with a filet down his pants on his way home. Chef was trying to figure out where product was going and caught him.
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    DefiantTelephone... That gf one is crazy, could have k someone! I have seen many stupid things, I remember making all the potatoes for Sunday lunch, par boiled and laid out in baking trays ready for roasting in the morning. I told one of the team to
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    "cling them" le put cling film on them, he apparently thought I said "sling them" and he chucked them all in the bins... literally a few mins after he'd helped me make them. Enough potatoes for 400 people.
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    -Supreme We had a busser who was stealing cash tips off the tables in our "sun room" which had a storage closet. The door only opened from the outside and apparently he didn't know. We heard him screaming as we shutting down. Found a bunch of stashed check books stuffed behind a table.
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    Melodic_Bet4220 Dish dog would throw away hard to clean pots and pans instead of washing them. We only had one large stock pot. When it turned up missing (immediately) we found it in the dumpster mixed with trash from the dish pit and a whole bunch of silverware. When I called him out on it he was like "how did that get there!? I
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    didn't do it!". We actually let him work again the next day. I checked his trash as he was trying to slip it out the back. Sure enough, he had a sh ton of silverware and some 6 pans with baked on food. He claimed that he was "only throwing away the ones with dents". I hope that kid learned some lessons and is doing better now.
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    bleezzzy Dude modified chefs recipe that made 2 24qts into 3 24qts by watering it down. Everyone complained about the dude but they didn't have a reason to fire him. We cheered that day.
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    PStrobus Worked at a small local joint, like a house converted into a restaurant, there was a walkin in the basement. Young kid was working alone and got an unexpected slam. He needed some more of our house made bolognaise so runs downstairs with no container
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    or spoon and just grabs a handful (she was thick when chilled). Runs back up, owner is now in the kitchen. Kid trys to hide a fistful of bolognaise behind his back while talking to the owner. Didn't pan out
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    EquivalentProof4... I had a friend that got busted stealing the camera, they literally have, a video of him climbing up unscrewing the camera and disconnecting it. Why, we got ped that they didn't trust him.
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    hanks_panky_em... Same guy, two events. First event, he f ed up grilling a chicken breast. It's an easy system but he was newish (while claiming he knew everything), dropped the raw chicken breast on the spatula and squeegee. As ya'll know, time to scrub those suckers clean. But he starts putting them back on the rack, so we gotta wash
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    that too. Then after picking up the chicken off the floor, he put it on the grill. I about lost it, but we got through it. His trainer got a quiet questioning by the district supervisor. After a few weeks working his shift solo (closers are always alone, but opening/day/lunch gets 3-4 folks) he got a busy rush.
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    It's a gas station grill, designed for small orders that take about six minutes to make. Some people will order four course meals for a family of five, each item with special order requests via our kiosks. Dude threw the batter pan across the kitchen, banshee screamed, kicked the pan a bit, spit on a customer through the delivery window, punched our online ticket
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    machine, threw some knives of the floor, and dumped all of our fry bags out on the floor. Then he screamed 'f this' and left. Never to be seen again. I guess fired via abandonment.
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    Lost about $300 in sales but when she told me that I said II Id wanna react the same way too." Since we make everything from raw (not like fast food where we can hold food items in a warmer for a few hours) everything takes a while to make. Longest
  • 47
    order I had to make took about an hour and a half. Was a lot of burgers, fries, and some pizzas. They complained to corporate that I was the only one there. It was a sunday, about ten minutes before close. Kitchen manager told me not to worry about it, corporate nearly laughed in the customers face (via email).
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    Job kinda s ks because of how often we get slammed with huge orders while expected to close the entire store perfectly every night by ourselves. But it pays well above the norm for food service work in my area.
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    CommandAble22... A young missy joined our staff one Wednesday evening. We chatted for a few minutes before shift. In those few minutes, I learned that she was used to having "help" at home, in the form of a housekeeper, nanny, and au pair (I did not understand the difference between the last two, and Young Missy didn't explain).
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    She took this job to learn how to cook (? as a busgirl ?) to impress her boyfriend. One of the managers came by, and thrust a broom in her hand. "Here. Can you sweep up around the chip machine?" Young Missy looked at me with utter doe-eyed helplessness. She held the broom like a fish with an accordion.
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    "How do you sweep?" She left a few minutes later. I don't think she technically got fired, though. Not a word of this is exaggerated nor untrue. It's been 30 years and I still mutter "How do you sweep?" when I'm up a basic task.
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    PatientTurtle I'll tell you what the dumbest thing I've seen someone do is and them NOT get fired. Witnessed a cook drop buffalo chicken nuggets in the fryer grease to "clean them" when he realized they were for kids and should be plain. Came out completely
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    black. Also throwing raw meat and veggies together in the fryer to add to pastas. We were an expensive place. They were that desperate to have warm bodies. Sh was crazy. He ended up being a no call no show
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    Cheezburger Image 10536804096
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    RhoynishRoots Guy brought a duffel bag into the walk in and just filled it with whole turkeys. Not sure what he was thinking, given the obvious cameras and the fact what several whole turkeys are sure to be noticed as missing ahead of the Thanksgiving holidays.
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    Logical-Shame58... As a rookie in my early years I literally almost got fired for notifying my Chef via text " | may be late" but I wasn't late id make it just on time I was late in the chef's eyes because I wasn't changed fast enough. The chef also demanded if we were going to be late to please notify them.
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    StormzNeverLast Working in flip flops, cutting toe nails in the office, cleaning car floor mats in the dish room, leaving for 2 hours while clocked, serving undercooked chicken, and many other things. I never thought I would have to write someone up for any of
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    these, but people never cease to amaze me. She probably went back to subway, but I have not been to subway since the day she started working for me lol.
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    New_Quantity_8101 I was working for a video game company as a tester in the PSP days. There were 20 of in the room, we each had a dev kits and other hardware, worth around $50k each. No food policy in the room. overcooked popcorn a bit in the breakroom, brings it back into the dev room. He
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    opens it and smoke billows out. This triggers a pre- alarm for the fire extinguishers in the room. Because there was about a million dollars of hardware in there, security had to verify the existence of a fire before the sprinkler system turned on. Security comes running in, sees the situation, radios very loudly back "Its just popcorn, kill the alarm". Dude got fired on the spot.
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    Random-Man562 Worked at Disneyland. Was going on lunch and manager gave the three of us workers plates. Said thanks, went to lunch, got back and was greeted by a different manager. "Did you eat that plate you took?" "I did! Thank you."
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    "Did you pay for it?" "I.. uhh. No?" "yeah, boss wants to talk to you" Chef was so mad about the whole thing. Called them ah_les and even tried to pay out of pocket for the food. As did I.
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    I was the worker who would pick up any and all extra shifts because I was having/had a child while I worked there. Oh well.. now I'm on my way to becoming an engineer lol
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    Cheezburger Image 10536803840
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    U... Gm passed me the new guy saying "show him how to run grill but he's not allowed to touch anything cuz he's 16, insurance thing." I left that night.
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    Old_F _on_pogie New dishie working. (Training shift) the house manager/hostess asked him to run the cutlery. His response, "I don't take orders from women" (she was very polite about making the request) I sent him home, and asked the
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    hostess to drop a line to the dish manager. I sent an email explaining why 'new guy' was clocked in for a total of 90 minutes. Never saw him again.
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    osirisrebel I'll go with myself, got fish out of a fryer and got fired for not shaking it enough times. Yes, I will use this story any chance I get. This came less than 5 minutes after the same lady that fired me check my station
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    and told me that she could tell that I was doing everything perfectly, but apparently I wasn't shaking it to company standard.
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    Comfortable-Poli... Server named Beansie threw out 5 gallons of beans and rice family meal because he thought we didn't "do leftovers ".
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    That didn't get him fired only because it was his first day. What got him fired was disappearing on a Friday night only to be found playing guitar in the bar across the street in an attempt to pick up a few of the customers. No body told him it was a lesbian bar
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    lamamermaid666 Younger server but has been there for a few months. Chef said 86 pork chops at pre- service meeting. Twenty minutes in to service 2 pork chops come back. She thought we had 86 pork chops and had noted that we now had 84. The kitchen was brutal after that. I felt bad for the kid.
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    1500 000
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    AllegraGellarBioP... I got fired from a job once for "tampering with the security cameras". I'd only worked there a month or so, and I was already burnt out on the job for several reasons. The kitchen manager/owner was awesome, ran a good crew, and the pay was good, but it was a bar that closed at 2:30am every night and I had closing shifts. That on
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    its own wouldn't be unbearable, but for some reason they only hired a dishwasher on Wednesday nights (?) so the line cooks had to do all the closing dishes as well as the line closing duties. They also required the line cooks to not only make a prep list for the openers but to actually make sure they were completely prepped and ready for service the next day, despite the openers
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    coming in several hours before service. This meant putting off closing the kitchen until 3 to 4am most nights, which means getting out at 4:30 or so most days. I could have maybe managed this when I was 20 years old, but in my mid-30s it was a bit much. All this has really nothing to do with why I was fired, but it is just context for why I didn't give a sh about the job.
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    One night, a month or so into the job, I was closing down at about 3am on a Tuesday, and I happened to notice the security camera pointing at the prep area and wondered "do they even really check these?" So I stuck a plastic half-quart container over it to see how long it took them to notice because I thought it would be funny. I didn't give it another thought until 6 weeks later when I got
  • 78
    called into the office and the one manager whose job it was to check the cameras asked me why I'd done it. Apparently it took her that long to even notice it, and she got in trouble for not doing her job. I basically said I didn't know why I did it and I thought it would be funny to see how long it took them to figure it out, but she didn't see the humor in it. I finished up my shift,
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    and the next day got a call that I was being let go. I was not bummed out and had already been looking for another gig for weeks, but I also didn't think it was a hanging offense. I've been in kitchens for 20 years, and as far as jokes and pranks go this one was pretty mild. I guess that particular manager didn't think it was funny.
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    IONTOP Server got into an argument with Chef because she asked if chicken wings were white or dark meat... It was the funniest thing I've ever witnessed... Ended up with chef screaming "HAVE YOU EVER EATEN A CHICKEN WING?"
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    And her yelling back "NO NEVER" And just devolved into her admitting she HAS eaten a chicken wing and chef losing his sh...
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    It was awesome. Because this girl bragged about having her Somm 1, like it wasn't just a course you could pay to get. She didn't get fired for THAT, but any goodwill was gone...
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    De d-House-Mou... It was the third morning the guy had worked there, and he got caught absolutely devouring a piece of cake in the freezer right before morning break. He could've gone to his car like two minutes later and we would've been none the wiser.
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    PandaChef92 I was dumb enough to argue with my kitchen manager about the cooks serving spoiled food, and constantly putting raw meat in RTS surfaces. I got fired for that. I thought it was pretty stupid
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    sjustin3rawr Had a girl request a weekend off for a music festival. She was denied then she called out "sick" that Friday then no call no show the next 2 days. She was fired on Monday
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