Weird ways to get fired at work

UngaWunga said:
VM from my boss, who was also laid off, after finding the doors locked monday morning.
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On Christmas vacation early 2000's, called my boss the day before I got back to ask about what I needed to hit first Monday morning, and he says nothing. The VC pulled the plug, plant closed, doors chained, you lose your last paycheck, you lose all accrued vacation, your healthcare ends Dec 31st, have a nice life. And that's the last time I ever heard from that bastid.

Merry effin Christmas to me that year :mad:

Found a new gig in April.
 
Bill said:
On Christmas vacation early 2000's, called my boss the day before I got back to ask about what I needed to hit first Monday morning, and he says nothing. The VC pulled the plug, plant closed, doors chained, you lose your last paycheck, you lose all accrued vacation, your healthcare ends Dec 31st, have a nice life. And that's the last time I ever heard from that bastid.

Merry effin Christmas to me that year :mad:

Found a new gig in April.
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Same deal here, basically. But the state sued the company, and a long time later I got a check.
 
GaryM said:
Under the heading of 'weird ways to think you got fired at work',...
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Along those lines...I was a young-ish, recent grad, started my full time position out of college with a corporation - my first business trip... come back to the office to find it all packed, what little I had. um, huh?

My officemate apologized for not intercepting me right away... the department was just shuffling people around ...
 
UngaWunga said:
Same deal here, basically. But the state sued the company, and a long time later I got a check.
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Turns out the VC stopped paying the bills a few months before the closure, long list of creditors looking for cash that wasn't there. I know of no one who successfully got any money owed from that fustercluck.
 
Bill said:
Merry effin Christmas to me that year :mad:
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One nice thing I'll say for LM - it was company policy that we would not lay off personnel after Thanksgiving. Back out a two-week notice, and if you weren't notified by the second week of November you were safe at least until mid-January.
 
Since were doing layoff stories...

Second time I was laid off, they called everyone into the cafeteria for an unscheduled all hands the week before Christmas, and then couldn't get all the right people on the piped in conference call, so they sent everyone back to their desks and said come back after lunch. Everyone knew the company was on the rocks, so during lunch a few lab systems that contained copies of all the company's IP mysteriously had their hard drives go missing. I was in IT and got an extra month to wipe all the systems, and had to hand a few people that were on vacation during the big meeting their box of stuff when they got back to no job or company.

Third time I was laid off, we knew it was coming and were taking bets on the day. When the day hit, the list was of course secret, but someone figured out that all you needed to do was look for "USER LOCKED" in the account db change log and set up a job to dump that to a file. I shared the location of that file with a few friends outside of IT, and then five minutes later my name was on it. When security escorted me back to my desk to clean it out, they were surprised I was already packed. Even though I suspected I'd be laid off, I just hadn't unpacked since the previous three cube moves. My guess on the day was wrong. The winning guess was the Thursday that was 60 days before the end of the fiscal year.

First time I was laid off was unremarkable.
 
At least one or two of my former colleagues from my most recent job found out that, while the company had been withholding taxes from their pay, they never actually bothered to remit that money to at least one state. Probably more than one; I’m anticipating hearing from my own state dept. of revenue.

Some companies do some really shady, crappy stuff when they’ve blown through all the VC money and the investors stop writing big checks. The worst bit is, the holding company and any actual assets are in the UK; the US corp has nothing but a huge mound of debt that they’ll no doubt default on if they haven’t already.

Startup life, right?
 
I started a new job working for a friend's company on 9/11/2001. Yep, that 9/11. The business declined significantly, and a year later in September, my job was eliminated along with five or six others. My friend was generous - three month's pay after working there just one year. Three and a half years later he hired me back.
 
On a completely reverse note (perhaps worth its own thread?) weird ways of getting hired… there was a local guy whom during the height of the farm crisis of the 1980’s lost his farm, had a wife and three kids to provide for and was close to destite. He didn’t know what to do, very few jobs around and it was very competitive to get even basic labor jobs to survive because many men were in the same spot. He got the genius idea to just show up at starting time to a local motor home manufacturing facilities guard shack and said it was his first day and he didn’t know where to go. After a bunch of hee hawing around to try to figure out where this dude was supposed to be they just sent him to “Bertha” the main final assembly line building with a name to ask people he saw to find where he was supposed to be, and ended up on the line and worked his arse off, after two full paycheck cycles he asked his supervisor why he wasn’t getting a paycheck? “Must have been a screw up in the personnel department” and received back pay to day one at a $1 above what starting starting wage was. Ended up working their until he retired and moved up fast in the company, he became a bit of legend in the workers culture at the facility as an example of taking initiative. Two years ago my nephew interned there over the summer and that Christmas told me the story “as he had heard it” of the man I knew well.
 
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Bob Noel said:
When working layoff lists, we were specifically told that we could NOT include people that wanted to be included in the layoff (e.g., I had one guy that was planning to retire real soon and he wanted to spare someone else the pain of being terminated)... only the poor performers were allowed to be part of the layoff.
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When I was doing layoffs (around 2003, IIRC) we weren't allowed to accept a volunteer who was not otherwise a candidate for layoff, and there was a reason.

During the defense downturn in the late 1980s, my company (Martin Marietta at the time) had a large layoff that fell under the WARN act. At that time, the company accepted volunteers, which seemed like a nice thing to do but it bit the company down the road. Naturally, most of the layoff volunteers were people who planned to retire soon anyway. Somebody who was near retirement and had many years with the company was looking at six months of severence pay, and for many people the company bridged their time in service to let them qualify for their pensions. The voluntary layoff eased the company's over-staffing problem and allowed the senior employee to slide gracefully into a nice retirement while saving a junior employee from losing his job.

But then there was a class-action suit alleging age discrimination. The courts refused to distinguish between voluntary and non-voluntary layoffs, and tossed all those elderly volunteers into the class. This skewed the layoff demographics horribly and the company lost big time.

So from then on, during layoffs the company refused to accept volunteers.
 
How about being laid off before you were hired?

I was in my senior year of HS, looking for summer work before leaving for college. Most places won’t hire you knowing that you’re leaving in a few months. Just so happened a local department store was going out of business. The national chain had already sold all of the merchandise and fixtures to a liquidator and the final day was the end of August. Perfect, I had to report to preseason training camp mid-August.

So I told them when I’d be leaving and they hired me on the spot. I enjoyed the people I worked with (for the most part) but some of the customers were atrocious. I’m a people person and some of the managers…weren’t. They would send me out to deal with some of the annoying customers to explain that the national chain’s weekly 20% off coupon was no longer valid at this location due to the liquidation (there were signs hanging from the ceiling throughout the store reflecting this).

The most memorable customer came in and purchased over $1000 worth of merchandise at somewhere between 50-70% off. The percentage went higher with each passing week. However, the point of sale I was assigned to did not have a barcode scanner, so I had to use the 10-key to manually input each and every barcode. For $1000 worth of merchandise, you can imagine that this was not a quick process. The lady (and that’s putting it very nicely) finally snapped and said, “You’re so stupid! Your momma shouldn’t have let you live. She should have pinched your little head off.” I finished her transaction, and as she was walking away, I said, “Have a nice day ma’am!” The glare she gave me…priceless!
 
UngaWunga said:
VM from my boss, who was also laid off, after finding the doors locked monday morning.
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I vividly remember as a child of eight or nine being awakened at 4:30 or so to take a 3-hour car ride to a downtown Chicago bank building.

The previous evening, the company accountant had gone around to all of the employees at closing time and provided their computed final pay in the form of a check prior to mailing several other checks.

There were insufficient funds to cover all of the checks just written. Therefore he strongly urged people to go to the headquarters itself and cash - not deposit - thier payroll checks.
 
MauleSkinner said:
“Nearly.” The one I’m aware of tore apart the program pretty severely by dividing the students around his issue before they finally fired him.

And honestly, looking back it wasn’t the first time he tried it.
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Tried what? Yeah, even the most obnoxious faculty can be hard to get rid of. Pretty much, they have to be convicted of murder or rape to get fired. And more often than not, if they're old enough, they're allowed to retire rather than being fired.
 
judypilot said:
Tried what? Yeah, even the most obnoxious faculty can be hard to get rid of. Pretty much, they have to be convicted of murder or rape to get fired. And more often than not, if they're old enough, they're allowed to retire rather than being fired.
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I’m being intentionally vague here, because I was named in the lawsuit. ;)

But it involved selection and use of contractors contrary to what the college chose.
 
flyingpreacher said:
How about being laid off before you were hired?
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I once was hired and quit before I started. I had been out of work for a month of so, filling in with contract work, when an engineering position came up at a largish company 10 minutes from. This company was notoriously hard to get into unless you knew somebody and I didn't, but I had the skill set they needed. I was offered and accepted the job, went through the pre employment screening, drug test, etc., etc. Start date was Wednesday; on Friday a friend from one of the companies I had done contract work for called me. "Our engineer just quit, you want a full time job with us?" Thought about it over the weekend and called the first company on Monday saying I had an offer I couldn't refuse and wouldn't be working there. They were nice about it, but I figured I'd burned that bridge forever.

Fast forward a year, the company got bought out by a competitor and I was on the street again. Called up the other company, got the expected "Sorry, when you blew us off we hired somebody else, we have no openings." About as expected... then got a call a week later, "The engineer we hired instead of you just died, do you still want the job?" I was able to skip all the pre-employment formalities as I'd already gone through them a year prior. Not how I would have chosen to get a job but it worked out pretty good, 23 years later I'm still working there.
 
DaleB said:
At least one or two of my former colleagues from my most recent job found out that, while the company had been withholding taxes from their pay, they never actually bothered to remit that money to at least one state. Probably more than one; I’m anticipating hearing from my own state dept. of revenue.

Some companies do some really shady, crappy stuff when they’ve blown through all the VC money and the investors stop writing big checks. The worst bit is, the holding company and any actual assets are in the UK; the US corp has nothing but a huge mound of debt that they’ll no doubt default on if they haven’t already.

Startup life, right?
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One startup I worked for loaded up inventory on trucks and drove it around for the day while doing inventory counts in the warehouse. Company eventually got bought, but only the 3 C-suite ****ers made any money on the stock.
 
In the "it's no fun to lay people off either" column. I totally agree that normally it's far worse to be laid off, but I had to lay someone off recently. I felt absolutely terrible and that we had failed the team and, especially of course, her. But we'd had a bad stretch of proposals not being funded and simply had to make a change before things got desperate later this year.

I've always liked her and appreciated that she was always very direct and transparent, but fact is, she was also the weakest person on the team. So I talked with her and told her what to expect (retained PTO, two months official notice, six months severance, health plan option, etc) and her response was, "I've been thinking about retiring anyway, if it would help the rest of the team I can skip all that". I was happy to be able to tell her that we appreciated it but nothing of the sort would be allowed nor necessary. She had earned all that and I wasn't going to let her pass on any of it.
 
Flatiowa said:
On a completely reverse note (perhaps worth its own thread?) weird ways of getting hired…
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I was a year into a 23 year career with a pioneering Seattle biotech and had a full-time hire to fill.
Resumes poured in. Dozens and dozens and dozens. I whittled them down by splitting them into 3 piles, no, maybe, interview. Started in on the interviews. The 6th or 7th seemed to be the guy. Had the technical skills and he seemed to have the intangibles. (I always put a lot of emphasis on the intangibles, because you can teach someone skills, but you can't teach them not to be an arsehole). Toward the end of my interviews, I always shut up and let the silence stretch until it became uncomfortable. Yes, it was a test. Most people will try to fill the awkward silence. Some people ask if we are done. Some folks start asking questions. Some just start blathering. This guy mentions a friend and coworker who had also applied for the job.

Went back to my office and looked for the "other guy" and found him in the "maybe" pile. Side-by-side the resumes were nearly identical, and I couldn't figure out how one had ended up in the "maybe" pile and one in the "interview" pile, except my process was something less than scientific. Racked with guilt, I called in the other guy, and you guessed it, I hired him. He worked for me for 22 years, and outlived me by a year at the company when it was bought out.

A couple days after the hire, before the guy had started, I was watching Seattle's summer festival's Seafair Parade. The U of W Husky band was marching in the parade and playing the Husky fight song. There is my guy, playing trumpet, stumbling along, clearly carrying a few too many. Hilarious!

Later, I ran into both of them together at a local watering hole. They were still friends. The original guy had gotten a job quickly, and we all got a good laugh out him having talked himself out of a job.
 
flyingpreacher said:
How about being laid off before you were hired?
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Had that happen twice.

One was for a chief pilot job for a small corporate flight department. I went through all their hoops for the hiring process with scheduled date for training for the Beech 400, set reservations in a swankier hotel than I would have gotten for myself when the HR person called me and told me they are going to hire someone else.

Another time I showed up for an interview with a freight company. I sat in the waiting area for 2 hours waiting for someone to do something. Finally a few people walked out of the office and one came to me. He told me things have changed and the company just sold all the planes and gave all the routes to another company. So there is no job and no need for pilots.

Then there was the time in Alaska when we showed up for work one winter morning to find the doors chained shut and the planes gone. It took a court order to get a door unlocked so we could retrieve our personal items, mainly flight bag.
 
When I was in grad school, a chemist friend of mine got a rejection letter from Conoco. It wasn't yet ConocoPhillips. Then a couple of weeks later, another rejection letter from Conoco.

He swore that he had never, in his life, applied for a job at Conoco. And the rest of us in the department had a good laugh over how very much Conoco didn't want him, going to the trouble of sending out proactive rejections and all.
 
Once had a new hire receive a “no thanks” letter on his first day of work. HR somehow missed that we’d hired him.
 
When the new owners of my television station fired me back in 1996, I quickly had an offer to manage a station with another broadcasting company, subject to approval from the CEO. I flew to meet him in Illinois, and one of the first things he asked me was, "What happened to you?" I told him I had my opinion that was a bit different from what I was told when they canned me. His response was, "Never mind, I've been there, too. I know what you mean."

I got the job and loved it.
 
Lndwarrior said:
"I want to be the last one fired"

My boss, Albert, was a Russian SOB and principal in our engineering firm.

Chris and I were his "number 2" in our group. Chris had an engineering degree, but I had gotten there the long way.

We were equally running separate parts of the biggest engineering job in our company. Chris was smart, but also an a**kisser. He had come up with, admittedly, a great engineering solution for our large project. Albert never gave Chris credit for this, I think because he didn't understand it.

Yearly reviews come around and Albert asks me what my goals are for the new year. In all seriousness I say, "to be the last one fired." In the construction industry layoffs are common. The good engineers are typically the last ones fired. I thought my response was logical.

Albert got p***d. "Vat?? Vatt?? I can't put that down on this form!! What is wrong with you?", he yells. I tried to explain but he wasn't having it and we finally agreed on some BS goal.

Shortly thereafter the project gets final approval from the Office of the State Architect and Chris sees a way to get Albert on his side.

Chris approaches me with his idea. He wants to fake an award from a national organization and present it to Albert as if it were real. The award would be for Chris's idea noted above.

I thought he was joking, but he wasn't. "Chris, you leave me the hell out of this!", was my response.

Stupid Chris goes ahead with his plan. He even pays to have a fake plaque made up. Then he tells our marketing department about the award. He explains that he secretly applied to the national organization and they ended up giving Albert this special annual award for engineering.

We have multiple offices in multiple states, so marketing sets up a big production with video streaming the other offices, food, wine, the whole none yards (look that one of if you don't know where it comes from). They do a email blast to all our clients throughout the country announcing the award.

Chris proudly presents the award to Albert in front of everyone. Albert, however, is clueless. He didn't understand Chris' idea and he had no idea about this award. Nevertheless he stands there with his puffed out chest, as was his way.

Two days later...

Somehow, the national organization heard about this and checked their records. It took our CEO no time at all to find out what happened. Chris was escorted from the building the same day.

This was not the end of it however.

At the end of the month a board meeting was held. The principals voted to remove Albert from the company. He did get a nice send off and a significant ESOP buyout.

I ended up taking over the entire project and managing it until the end.

As it turned out, I achieved my goal for the year....

(Yeah, I couldn't make this up if I wanted. Fun fact, Albert ended up retiring to the same gated community as I did, many miles away from the office. I make a point to avoid the bas***d.)
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Great story. Is that how obama got the Nobel?
 
JackL-3J said:
I assume you made discrete inquiries into the circumstances. :rolleyes:
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Hah! At the time nobody knew what the circumstances were. I've since learned, all I can say is it was a sad case that wasn't work related.
 
MauleSkinner said:
I’m being intentionally vague here, because I was named in the lawsuit. ;)

But it involved selection and use of contractors contrary to what the college chose.
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OMG, I know someone who got fired for more or less the same reason. But that was in Illinois and I happen to know the contractor was in Washington, so it couldn't have involved you ;). Also, he was a professor, but also the president of the university, so not quite the same, as presidents don't have tenure (as presidents). I don't know if he had a courtesy tenured appointment in whatever department was his specialty. When I fired myself, I was safe, so to speak, because I did have such an appointment. I simply went back to teaching instead of going elsewhere (which I couldn't do anyway as my husband at the time was very ill and I couldn't move him). They were pretty happy to have me.
 
Flatiowa said:
That’s good, I had wondered if was one of the guys at Parker or Hanson
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No, never heard of Hanson and Parker is actually one of our competitors (in some areas, we don't do big valves like you describe).
 
GaryM said:
When I was in grad school, a chemist friend of mine got a rejection letter from Conoco. It wasn't yet ConocoPhillips. Then a couple of weeks later, another rejection letter from Conoco.

He swore that he had never, in his life, applied for a job at Conoco. And the rest of us in the department had a good laugh over how very much Conoco didn't want him, going to the trouble of sending out proactive rejections and all.
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That right there is funny. Ah oil companies. I interviewed with one when I was in grad school, mainly to see if they had summer jobs and to get a feel for the company. It's been so long I don't remember where my husband and I were in our educations (he was a few years younger than me and might have been just getting ready to start his graduate program), but what I DO remember is that the recruiter, who apparently thought I was pretty bright, asked me if I'd divorce my husband to move to Houston to work for them. Needless to say, when I start interviewing for real with oil companies a few years later (after my husband had finished his PhD and I'd been in a postdoc for a couple of years), I avoided that company. The way I remember it, I gaped at the guy for a couple of minutes and got up and walked out. Nowadays, I could probably sue him and the company for even asking, but things were a little different back then.

Incidentally, I didn't end up working for an oil company. It was an interesting world. The highest salary offer I got was from one company, and when I talked with my potential future boss about what he'd be having me do, he couldn't answer. I slowly realized that they just wanted to get me off the market so no one else could have me. I ALMOST went to work for another oil company. I had decided to accept their offer and was going to call to accept, but it was 4:45 pm, so I decided to wait until the morning to call. In that 15 minutes, I got an offer from the USGS, in Denver. The money was a lot less, but it was in Denver and not Houston (which I had to work hard to convince myself I could tolerate) and I would have a lot more freedom to direct my own work. I also was nervous about the fact that the oil company clearly saw me as a future female manager, and even said something about becoming a manager in 5 years. I wasn't the least bit interested in becoming a manager (I did, eventually, but decades later). So I jumped at the opportunity in Denver, and my morning call to the oil company was to decline.
 
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I flew to Missouri to interview for a job running a TV news department in Jefferson City. The general manager seemed very interested in me, but after about three weeks with no word, I accepted another offer. A
few hours later, she called to offer me the job, but since I had already accepted a different offer, I declined. I often wondered what it would have been like to be the manager of my college roommate, who was an anchor person there.
 
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