I applied for a warehouse job and the interviewer loved me and my resume and said I was hired, I just had to fill out a basic literacy test. I was studying at university so it was a silly thing to ask but he said it’s just a formality; they have to do it.

One question said “describe yourself in three sentences”. I wrote something like “I am very punctual. I enjoy stacking boxes. I’m a self starter. I always do more than asked.” Get it? It’s four sentences but they asked for three. The fourth one being about doing more than asked. Funny right?? Yeah the interviewer called me back saying head office didn’t find it funny and I was disqualified for failing the literacy test.

I figured I dodged a bullet because it must suck to work for a bunch of people without a sense of humour!

I refused to return to office.

Not actually fired, but I just resigned from a relatively high paying career position without something lined up.

I work in tech, and some parts of that market are very much in flux due to AI disruption. For this company it led to a shuffle and, in my opinion, a lot of people ending up in roles they shouldn’t be in.

A few things happened during that shuffle. First, I was overlooked for a promotion that otherwise seemed in the bag (to the point where others were equally confused). Ultimately the person who ended up as my boss really should not be where they are. They don’t understand the business and started making other bad decisions without even consulting the team of experts on hand. In fact, they apologized to me for “starting off on the wrong foot”, but the damage was largely done, and they kept making really bad calls anyway – calls which put the team constantly at risk and kept things very inefficient.

And yes, of course they are good friends with the new CEO.

That exacerbated a lot of issues we already had with constantly juggling tasks and chronic understaffing. After that promotion snub, plus being one of the few really holding things together anyway, I realized that the stress of the position entirely outweighed the stress of finding another job. Obviously I also felt like upward mobility was no longer a thing. I was dreading work every morning. I started to get really bad anxiety. I wanted to find something else, but my mental state was such that I didn’t have the drive to seek alternatives or interview while also working at this place. I asked to reduce my weekly workload for a while, and when it wasn’t working too well, I asked to go on leave to try and combat the burnout. New boss was instantly waffling on approval, so I felt I had no other realistic option but resignation.

My wife and I are in a pretty secure financial position, and she’s got her own job that is going well. It is the first time in my life I have resigned from a position without anything lined up, which admittedly does feel weird. Taking some time for better mental health, then to hone a few skills, then will be returning to market.

I had a panic attack at work and a coworker heard me cursing through tears.

In fairness, I’m sure hearing variations on “fuck damn ass piss shit fuck fuck” over and over was annoying.

Took too much unlimited PTO. All of it approved too. Idk.

Bug in the new point-of-sale software that the managers couldn’t fix caused a small (under $200) sale to not process correctly. Was terminated for money mismanagement. Mgmt was so incompetent that they lost one of their best sellers, and ended up paying me unemployment through the lockdown because they couldn’t defend the termination to the unemployment office.

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I finally made a vague comment pushing back against my boss’s fucking unhinged conspiracy theories and shitty beliefs after being forced to hear him spout it for nearly a year.

“Wow, Wayne. I thought you were against the government regulating what people should do with their bodies. Huh… but okay.”

He turned purple, didn’t talk to me for the rest of the day, and never put me on the schedule after that.

Their entire business closed down a few months ago. I feel bad for were the ladies working there & my one co-worker. They were all part of the same church/religion, and they all basically cowered before Wayne. Wayne was an asshole who treated them all terribly. He was just mad that I didn’t let him treat me the same way.

They also didn’t want to give me more than 18 hours per week or raise my pay up from 12$ an hour for the highly specialized job I was doing.

Good riddance, Wayne.

I once was working as an apartment maintenance guy for a property in Colorado. During the interview I made it clear that I wasn’t looking to move into a high responsibility role immediately and that I wanted to spend some time familiarizing myself with some more specific types of repair before going into any sort of management track. The interviewer seemed to like that answer given my previous experience and resume and I was hired.

A few months later, I made a mistake because I was asked to take a tech from the local utility around to every single unit on the property. Originally the property manager told me I’d have three days to do the work, but I was pressured to do it faster so that the tech could make a flight to his next job. We were installing batteries in water meters, which required the unlocking and opening of water heater closets on resident balconies. The residents did not have a key to their closet and were not allowed access. The closets did not use doorknobs either. They were held shut by the deadbolt locks. That night a storm rolled in. The resident called the on call service complaining that the wind was blowing the door open, but the on-call tech told them to put something in front of the door to keep it shut and that we would be by in the morning to lock the deadbolt. They didn’t do as they were asked and their pipes froze, causing a flood in the unit below them.

Later that day, I was asked to hand over my keys. As I was getting them detached from my personal keys, the property manager told me that she felt that she was “sold a bill of goods” that I hadn’t lived up to and that she had hired me because i had looked like “management track material.” I told her that in the interview with the maintenance manager I said that I wanted a learning experience and that I wasn’t ready for management. I told them I had never lied to them and left the property.

A week later I had applied for and was interviewing for a new job at another property. My phone rang during the interview. I silenced it and apologized to the interviewer but carried on. After the interview I listened to the voicemail that my old boss had left. “When we offered you the job I had you mixed up with someone else. We hired the wrong person.”

If it happens, it will be because of ADHD

My best firing was from a job I got hired for at 16. Seasonal help for Victoria’s Secret in a local mall. This seems like a random detail, but makes the firing even funnier to me: VS (at least, this one) was bisected into the lingerie half of the store and the perfume/cosmetics half of the store. I was hired to work the perfume counter.

It was their holiday hiring push, so myself and a half dozen other women or so came in for a full day of group training—like get there ass early for hours of dumb safety/theft videos, paperwork, mock customer interactions & sales transactions on the POS, etc.

We finish all this up, and the trainer is congratulating us for being done as one of the managers is arriving for her shift. The trainer encourages us to introduce ourselves to the manager and each other & releases us for the day. I wasn’t shy, and was the first one to shake manager’s hand. She makes small talk and asks what scheduling preferences I had submitted. In response, I mentioned something about classes and she asks what college I go to.

When I laugh and correct her with the name of my high school, her face changes and she asks my age. “Oh, uhhh you can’t work here.” I am confused and tell her that I listed my correct information on the application. “Yeah, sorry, someone made a mistake. We only hire 18+ employees.”

To work the perfume counter. In a panties store. Meanwhile, 2023 me likes to periodically glance at Target’s growing sex toy selection (that is presumably stocked/rung up/at least VIEWED by minor employees) because it still feels novel. Victoria still had to mail me a check for training hours and can go fuck herself 😂

Refused to turn up to an unpaid yet compulsory training session while on my probation period. I think I dodged a bullet.

Technically, I was laid off and not fired, but here’s what happened: I intended to take five weeks of unpaid COVID leave in 2020 so that I could handle childcare until my wife’s Summer break started, but they laid me off two weeks in. I guess I just made myself an easy target. Fortunately, a previous employer hired me back within a few weeks, fully remote.

First job I wasn’t experienced enough (kitchen porter at a busy restaurant).

Next and last one my coworker was going to sue the boss for sexual assault and part of the crew including her were planning on suing for laboral exploitation (false contracts, unpaid hours, etc). The boss heard about it and fired us and threatened to sue us for bullshit (for staying after closing drinking, it was a pub so is something normal and some coworkers that were there but didn’t want to sue didn’t have any problem).

One of the many jobs I had in the past involved such gross violations of health and safety codes that my own immediate boss threatened to write me up on the first day because I was “going too slow” and actually following safety procedures. He demonstrated the “correct” way to do the job (blatantly skipping the safety procedures that I had just learned in training all the while) and said I needed to reconsider my priorities or quit.

I quit.

The job was at a hospital. I was working with contact hazard and breathing hazard critical care patients.