15+ Employees Who Got Fired Up... Then Just Got Fired

Workplaces are often unpredictable, but some employees manage to push the limits in ways no one expects. Through outrageous actions and unbelievable choices, these individuals left coworkers speechless. In this article, we’ll dive into 16 moments where employees completely crossed the line, sending shockwaves through their workplaces and turning everyday office life into total chaos.

• In a small town in PA, there were a string of burglaries and all the victims worked for the same employer. Come to find out a lady in the HR department used her knowledge of family, living situations, and employee schedules to know when a residence would be empty. © Most-Silver-4365 / Reddit

• A guy I knew got fired for being late too much. Union tried to get his job back at arbitration, he was late for that also. © JerrysKid714/ Reddit

• A firefighter I used to work with got caught removing antiques from a house while it was still on fire, and stashing them in the firetruck. He was... aggressively encouraged to resign. © swapdip / Reddit

• I worked in a store years ago that was being renovated. Our store manager was caught putting some boxes of floor tiles and buckets of paint in his car to use at his own house. We had a new manager the next morning. © Keefer1970 / Reddit

• A guy at my old job called in sick... then went live on Instagram from a pool party. With our manager’s niece. He was tagged in the video.
  The next shift, he showed up like nothing happened — got walked out before he could clock in. © han-ella / Reddit

• Years ago before cell phones, I had an employee that we caught going into a dark office and closing the door, then crawling under the desk with the desk’s phone.
  He was making calls from there selling long distance services. © CloisteredOyster/ Reddit

• I worked with a guy who would vanish to the bathroom for 45 minutes and mouth off to coworkers. He made big sales, so they let it slide, until a new female manager called him out. Instead of apologizing, he flirted with her.
  The next day, we witnessed him making inappropriate comments about her, clearly testing boundaries. As the day went on, his behavior escalated, and it became clear he was deliberately undermining her authority. The whole office was divided, with some people defending him because of his sales numbers, while others felt uncomfortable and disgusted. He was finally let go.

• This happened at my husband’s job. He had a co-worker on his team, had been there for a few months. Apparently, during downtime when he had nothing to do, he would browse the company files on their server, and he came across files that he was not supposed to have access to (he was mistakenly given the wrong clearance).
  It wasn’t anything that was a matter of national security, but it was something that was supposed to be for management’s eyes only. He started telling my husband and their co-workers what he saw. Someone overheard him and reported him. Got called into the director’s (or someone in upper management) office and was fired on the spot. © nofun-ebeeznest / Reddit

• Promotions manager at a radio station I worked for was selling the prize Disneyland tickets to pay for his wedding. Fired the second it came to light. © knitmeablanket / Reddit

• I worked at a place that required security clearance. One clear rule that everyone is stressed by is absolutely no pictures. A supervisor posted his office setup on Facebook. Canned the next day. © FlanSteakSasquatch / Reddit

• He worked the overnight tech support shift, mostly alone in the office for hours. One night, he took a stepladder into an empty office that shared a wall with the receptionist’s office, which is kept locked. He climbed the ladder and then onto the ceiling to access the next office.
  He jimmied the lock to the drawer and grabbed the box, and tried to climb back out. Except the ladder was really short, and he couldn’t get a toe hold, and he fell, breaking his ankle. He called the boss to say he needed to leave early, so the boss came in and found the place a disaster.
  The next morning, you could see these plaster dust hand prints sliding down the wall above the ladder. It was pretty entertaining. © yarn_slinger / Reddit

• Things started going missing from people’s desks. The culprit remained elusive until one day he showed his “brand-new iPod!” to another coworker. On the back, it was engraved with the name of a different coworker who had just had his brand-new iPod stolen. Managers were summoned, he was gone within minutes, and so were all the unsolved thefts. © zerbey / Reddit

• We hired a radiation physicist with an MS. He told us he was going for his Ph.D., and for 4 years gave us updates on how it was going. One day he came in and announced he had gotten his Ph.D., and we gave him a substantial raise.
  Then it turned out that he was never in a program, never got a Ph.D., and had patiently carried out a scam for 4 years. © CalTechie-55 / Reddit

• Coworker pretended to have a snake in a box (we’re in Texas) and chased someone who had a severe fear of snakes to the point they hid in their boss’s office (boss was gone on vacation that week), having a panic attack and sobbing under the desk.
  That was not a fun day, and they had me go home once I had calmed down enough, and then fired him, which was a long time coming, so I think they were relieved to have a reason to finally pull the trigger on firing him. © Kylie_Bug / Reddit

• My cousin and I work at the same law firm. She’s a paralegal, and I’m a junior attorney. One afternoon, a new hire saw us laughing and hugging in the hallway after a tough case. By the next morning, whispers were everywhere. Someone had assumed we were secretly involved.
  A few days later, we were called into a meeting with management. The new employee was there too, nervously explaining that she’d “jumped to conclusions” and hadn’t meant for anything to spread. Management wasn’t convinced. They reminded her that assumptions and rumors had no place in the workplace. After that, her behavior changed. She became distant, started missing deadlines, and eventually got fired. The gossip slowly faded, and my cousin and I went back to our routines — more careful, but relieved.

• I used to work at a mid-sized marketing agency where one of the senior designers thought he was untouchable. He would roll his eyes in meetings, ignore deadlines, and openly gossip about clients, but because he had “history” with the company, no one called him out. One week, he decided to “teach a lesson” to a junior colleague by deleting her project files and telling everyone she had forgotten to save her work.
  What he didn’t realize was that IT had recently implemented automatic backups with user logs. When the client complained about delays, management checked the logs and saw exactly who had deleted the files and when. He was called into a meeting, where they showed him the report. By the end of the day, his desk was cleared, his access revoked, and the junior designer was personally reassured by the CEO. No one missed his “seniority” after that.

• At a previous job, there was an employee in accounting who loved to snoop. She would wander into other departments “just to chat,” but somehow always ended up near unlocked computers or open folders. People started noticing small things, like her quoting numbers from confidential documents she shouldn’t have seen. Still, management didn’t have proof, so they couldn’t act.
  One afternoon, she used a coworker’s computer while they were at lunch and tried to email herself a file labeled “Salary Adjustments — Confidential.” She didn’t realize that the company had just activated a new security system that flagged any attempt to send sensitive files externally. IT got an alert, traced the activity back to her, and paused the email before it left the server. She was escorted to HR, where they showed her the screenshots and detailed logs. Her badge stopped working that same hour, and the office suddenly felt a lot more relaxed.

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