15+ New employees who got fired on the spot: 'She didn't even make it through the office tour'

Author image for Remy Millisky
Remy Millisky • Writer and Editor
Feb 5, 2026 11:00 AM EST

Forget about making it to retirement — these workers couldn't even make it through a single week of work before getting fired. 

I don't usually have any admiration for workers who've been fired for their poor behavior, but there's an exception here! 

These folks shared their stories of the workers they've seen get fired on the spot. The firing stories span numerous careers, although there are several about movie theater employees getting the boot, which is interesting. Why are so many of you getting fired from movie theaters? 

Well, one dude got canned because he organized the funnest day ever for his friends and family. He's a genius. Brilliant. A perfect plan. He got hired, and on day 1, for the very first screening of the day, he slipped 20 people into the theater for free. He then "closed sales," whatever that means, ensuring that it would be a private showing for just him and his pals. He swiftly got fired — he didn't totally think it through. There's a projectionist and managers involved, too. If the projectionist saw 20 people in a showing that didn't sell any tickets, there's no way that a manager wouldn't be notified. But still — I applaud this bad idea, and I'm sorry that this guy didn't get to have the movie experience that every teen dreams about. And I hope he knows, now that he's an adult with grown-up money, that you can rent out a movie theater starting at around $100. So, even if you just bring like 4 friends, you've already gotten your money's worth! 

Anyway, a lot of other people got fired for way less fun reasons than that, as you can read all about below. Some folks just aren't built to work, and they're not shy about telling their bosses that. I don't know if this one technically counts, but there was one guy who stole a lunch during an interview, so he was sort of fired before he even started. Sheesh. A candy bar costs like a dollar, and if he'd gotten the job he could've bought like 7 and a half candy bars per hour, but I suppose he didn't think it through, seeing as he thought it was ok to eat during an interview in the first place. 

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  • 01
    Boss in black suit holds cell phone to ear and looks sternly at smiling construction employee to his left
    via Getty Images For Unsplash+

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

  • 02
    Ashleighbell032 Not a manager but a former co worker of mine was fired from our inbound customer service rep job during our 2nd on the phones shift because he shouted at a customer "my god are you fucking stupid?!" HE SAYS he forgot to hit mute ..
    via u/Ashleighbell032
  • 03
    tryin2staysane I had a bartender who lost money her first shift by herself. The drawer started with $200, came back with $140. She had worked 6 hours and did not have many credit card tips or anything, so she "somehow" managed to spend all of her tips + $60 without leaving the building. Yeah, fired.
    via u/tryin2staysane
  • 04
    Proudlyevil not me, but I had a friend who supervised a movie theater. They hire this kid, first day, first showing of the day, he lets 20 people in and follows them in himself. he thought no one would notice he and his friends partying while watching a movie that he closed sales to so they'd have the room to himself.
    via u/Proudlyevil
  • 05
    Ne... Ok, i have one, but I'm not a manager. I had worked IT for quite a while. There was a guy I worked with at a job that was...troubled. but trying to get it together. He had lost a previous IT job because he was selling surplus gear on eBay. Through an odd set of circumstances, i met this guy in a social setting,
    via u/NedTaggart
  • 06
    unrelated to work. My friends that had known him a while said that the eBay thing is what led to him losing his last job. Anyway, smash cut to 4 years later, I'm a a completely different job and I see him. He had lost a TON of weight (not that he was fat or anything to begin. with). Anyway. I said dude what's up? He looked super
    via u/NedTaggart
  • 07
    skittish and said that he had just got hired. I said cool, hit me up sometime and we'll catch up. I never saw him again. That night he allegedly entered the building and made off with several servers. He didn't realize we had cameras everywhere and had him dead to rights
    via u/NedTaggart
  • 08
    hauling it off. He was given a choice to return it and leave or they'd file charges. He returned it and left.
    via u/NedTaggart
  • 09

    The audacity!

    Dried_Squid_ Dude grabbed a candy bar, opened it, and started eating it while waiting for the interview. Manager notices and asks the guy if he paid. for it, he said no, and manager told him to pay and then to fuck off.
    via u/Dried_Squid_
  • 10
    nymphaetamine When I supervised the testing room of an electronics recycling & reselling facility, I had to let a new guy go on his second day after he passed literally 50+ phones as good that all had critical faults, and also failed to wipe the data off of any of them. This was after I spent a full day personally training him and giving him a
    via u/nymphaetamine
  • 11
    printout with a checklist of everything he needed to test and what constituted a failure, and impressing how crucial it was to destroy all the data(we could be sued if any customer data was left on the phones). He was a super nice guy and I hated to do it but jesus, you have to try to f up as hard as he did.
    via u/nymphaetamine
  • 12
    I also got fired on day 2 of a job myself. It was at a tanning salon and they let me go cause I didn't want to go tanning. I guess there's a certain aesthetic they wanted the employees to have and my pasty goth ass just didn't fit. lol.
    via u/nymphaetamine
  • 13
    u_broke_it I work at a movie theater and we had to fire a new hire as soon as he showed up for his first shift. He had just left orientation and went to the sunglasses store across the street. He was talking to the worker there about how he just got hired at the theater.
    via u/u_broke_it
  • 14
    He then stole a pair of sunglasses. They showed us the camera footage and we fired him as soon as he showed up for his first shift.
    via u/u_broke_it
  • 15
    kenjiandco She didn't even make it through the office tour. We hire a lot of seasonal workers, and last year we had a girl with one of the LEGIT "small particles of peanut dust will absolutely kill her dead" peanut allergies. So we put up a few reminder signs, had some peanut free dishes and forks in the kitchen, that kind of
    via u/kenjiandco
  • 16
    stuff. New girl started a few weeks after most of the rest of the group, and when I was showing her around she pointed to the signs and asked sarcastically if we were serious. She looked genuinely surprised when I said they were REAL serious, and then smirked and said "you actually believe someone can die from peanuts?" and followed it up with "stuff like that isn't
    via u/kenjiandco
  • 17
    real, you'll see..." I asked a few questions to make sure she wasn't trying to make a terrible joke, and then went full manager speak and asked if she'd be able to follow the kitchen rules to keep her coworkers safe, and when it was obvious she was serious I told her she was done for the day and she could head home. I don't have hire/fire
    via u/kenjiandco
  • 18
    powers so I was a little worried when I took it to our boss if she denied it, it - would be her word against mine. Fortunately, when my boss took her aside to ask what happened, she replied weird about someone who's "Kenjiandco was getting all pretending to have one of those fake peanut allergies..." From what I hear,
    via u/kenjiandco
  • 19
    she was completely, genuinely shocked when she was fired.
    via u/kenjiandco
  • 20
    StarfishSt er I was the registrar in a college and I needed another assistant registrar. One of the women who has graduated with a masters in business from our college applied. Before I interviewed her, I asked all of her professors what they thought and they all thought she would be great. So I hire her and day 1 I know it's not
    via u/StarfishSt*bber
  • 21
    going to work. She didn't know how to file anything, she couldn't tell a last name from a first name, she asked what the typewriter was!! I asked her to print out some envelopes and she didn't even know how to open Word. I went to the Dean of the college and he agreed we'd let her go the next day.
    via u/StarfishSt*bber
  • 22
    goatnapper Had an employee I gave a warning about not pulling his weight at ~8:45 AM. At 9:30 my team informs me that he just announced in their 9:00 meeting that he taking a week long vacation, starting the next day. 9:35, he is nowhere to be found when I am looking for him to see if
    via u/goatnapper
  • 23
    they misheard about the impromptu vacation he failed to run by me. He shows back up at 10, confirms he had decided he needs a vacation while in the 9:00 meeting. I hope it was a nice vacation.
    via u/goatnapper
  • 24
    [deleted] Not fired, but did not hire a lady because during her interview we asked "describe a difficult situation at work and how you overcame it" and she replied "during my divorce I didn't want to talk to my ex and told my oldest child they would be the one arranging
    via u/[deleted]
  • 25
    visits with their father and my daughter said she didn't want to have to do that so I sent her to live with her dad. It was really hard but I ended up making the right choice". Nope.
    via u/[deleted]
  • 26
    [deleted] not a manager but one guy that got hired at the same time as me at the movie theatre got fired the next day. he would stand around in the halls. and when it was time to clean a theater he would disappear and hid in the bathroom to avoid working.
    via u/[deleted]
  • 27
    holiestnut Very late to this one. I managed a fast food restaurant, and hired someone to work primarily work in the back prep kitchen. The job involved cutting 5 to 10 20kg bags of potatoes per shift with a hand operated machine, dishes, and cleaning. Had a great trial shift, I schedule him in the next day at 12.
    via u/holiestnut
  • 28
    I arrive at 3 for the closing shift to find dishes piled high, enough cut potatoes. for maybe the next half hour maximum (should be enough for the night), and this guy sat in my damn office chair texting. Nope. Bye bye. 3 hours from the start of his shift, 15 minutes from when I walked in.
    via u/holiestnut
  • 29
    sluggyjunx Not a manager, but on a small landscaping crew I worked on over the summer while on college. (Think - Lawn Wranglers) One of my friends needed a job so we got him a spot on the crew. On his first day we were mowing a town house development. I went off on a walk behind and FNG grabs. a trimmer and heads off. A
    via u/sluggyjunx
  • 30
    couple hours later we break for lunch. Supervisor comes over and asks who was trimming. He says whoever it was just trimmed every single flower from one ladies elaborate corner garden. FNG had trimmed every one, thinking they were weeds. He was a bit dim. Boss made us spend the next day replanting her whole garden.
    via u/sluggyjunx
  • 31
    Another sidebar- I was fired from the same crew some weeks later after I lost control of a walk-behind Scag mower atop a 10' retaining wall. I lost footing near the edge and fell, the mower, a beat up old piece of crap with the safeties removed, kept going until it. drove itself off the wall and fell onto the hood of a new- ish car below. Still running, it
    via u/sluggyjunx
  • 32
    slid off the car, hit the ground and sputtered out in a cloud of oil smoke. It was not a good day.
    via u/sluggyjunx
  • 33
    marshmallow_uni... Had to tell someone on the first day of a tech support training class to click on the big blue E, she was gone at lunch break.
    via u/marshmallow_unicorn
  • 34
    chupathingy99 Not a manager but a girl I worked with was taking selfies at the register while I had a line out the door. I asked her if she planned on working today and she got mad at me for being rude to her. She lasted about a week after that.
    via u/chupathingy99
  • 35
    kjbanks First second he showed up. He was two hours late for his first day on the job. When I asked why he stated: "First snow day of the year, had to go sledding". I told him he could have all the time in the world to go sledding. Because I fired him.
    via u/kjbanks
  • 36
    [deleted] Girl's first day on the job (retail). "Oh I don't do trash". Manager made a note of it, and at the end of her shift, was told not to come back for her next scheduled shift. Earlier that
    via u/[deleted]
  • 37
    day we found a kitten and she had volunteered to take it home, and to my knowledge, did. Several years later, I still hope that kitten made it out ok.
    via u/[deleted]
  • 38
    holomntn A bit different from the others. For a while I was being hired to "streamline" software development at companies. This is mostly code for firing a bunch of people, they hired me so management didn't feel bad.
    via u/holomntn
  • 39
    So I'm at company 1. I have to inform Alfred (not his real name of course) that he is looking for a new job. A couple months later I'm hired by company 2. I have to inform Alfred that he is looking for a new job.
    via u/holomntn
  • 40
    A couple months later I'm hired by company 3. I have to inform Alfred that he is looking for a new job. A couple months later I'm hired by company 4. I walk in and Alfred starts packing up his desk. I called him in to inform him that he is NOT looking for a new job, he's getting a promotion.
    via u/holomntn
  • 41
    moviemerc I've had a few on first day or before end of week. Mostly for misrepresenting themselves just to get hired. Hired them specifically for overnights. Job posting said overnights. Official job offer said overnights. Schedule given to her was for overnight shifts. Didn't show for first night shift. Arrived in morning and said she can
    via u/moviemerc
  • 42
    only work days and I had to let her because she already was hired. Hired someone because they said in interview they will work evenings and weekends. Works two days and says she can only work 9-5 Monday through Thursday so she can spend weekends at her cabin.
    via u/moviemerc
  • 43
    Applied for job with description saying needs to be able to lift up to 60 pounds (unloading trucks) and first day on job says he can't do any heavy lifting because he hurt his back at his last job.
    via u/moviemerc
  • 44
    Last one - Was so excited to join company that he broke into locked up display with company swag (hoodie's etc) and stole a bunch of it to wear. This was probably two weeks into his 3 weeks of training.
    via u/moviemerc
  • 45
    Boss in black suit and tie holds coffee and talks on phone while looking stern
    via Getty Images For Unsplash+

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

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