1993... I was "removed from the schedule" of a gas station/convenience store I worked at in Georgia because the security camera caught me and a co-worker buying booze for two girls at 2am on a Sunday.

That was the icing on the cake after the manager of the store, who also kindly employed recovering drug addicts/alcoholics from a nearby halfway-house, found out me & this other guy were getting a co-worker from the halfway-house re-introduced to weed & liquor in the restroom around back while there was a line of customers in the store. A co-worker (who was also let go at the same time) was also using the restroom as a drop-off point for his weed selling business.

The store regularly came up short in their cigarette & alcohol counts, as well as car washes and gasoline from time to time. About six of us were let go.

burun wrote:I was let go from my statistical analysis/consumer survey gig (the second worst job in my life)

What was the first?

My first official "real" job, discounting cleaning offices and babysitting when I was in grade school and early high school, was at a department store called Elder-Beerman. I got the job the summer after I turned 16 and could finally drive into Green Bay by myself. Elder-Beerman was new to the mall and was hiring anyone at the time, and I figured it would be convenient due to the proximity to the De Pere Ice Recreation Center where I skated 30-40 hours a week.

I showed up to the orientation to find that Emily, the smart, funny girl from my Creative Writing class had also been hired. I was ecstatic. I dreaded my high school and Emily was the only person I had met there who shared my sense of humour or any of my interests and now we'd get the chance to work together at our first job and hang out in real life as opposed to only at school.

I was hired mainly to work in the Junior's section, which was across from Women's World (i.e. the fat chick section) where they had stationed Emily. Emily was a fairly skinny and very attractive young woman (sort of looked like Winona Ryder) and I never understood the decision to place her in the tents-with-armholes section of the store, but it worked out on our end of things, as this meant that our registers were directly across the walkway from one another and we could talk when it got slow and boring. It was often slow and boring because the clothing wares offered by the brilliant minds of the store were neither stylish, inexpensive, or of good quality. No one wants to buy poorly made, expensive crap that makes you look trapped in 1989.

Emily and I took to writing each other fake stalker notes in high school and leaving them tucked into books or each other's lockers. One day while bored and on lunch break in the completely grey breakroom that only offered magazines about soap operas or Good Housekeeping/Parenthood, I decided to write a stalker note to Emily.

It read something like this:

"Dearest Emily,

I hope you know that I am stalking you and you will never lead a normal life again. I am going to kill you and stuff your body into a Women's World full-sized garment bag.

Love,
The Stalker

*insert cartoonish drawing of decapitated chicken head*"

I shoved it in her locker and forgot about it until a day or two later when I got a call from Emily at work.

"Did you put some sort of note in my locker?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"Well, because the Ashwaubenon police were here when I got to work and waiting to meet with me."

"You're kidding, right?"

"No."

Apparently the note either slipped out of the slats in the locker or fell through a crack or something, because the paranoid, faked tanned-to-a-crust single mother who worked in the children's section of the store and had no life beyond obsessing over soap operas and hip-hop stars found the note and took it seriously. She brought it to L.P., which was headed by an ex-Navy Seal with perennially bloodshot eyes, who in turn called the police.

Emily told the Ash. PD that it was a misunderstanding and a joke, which took some convincing because they were 100% certain that she was being stalked and emotionally abused by "The Stalker." I arrived to work and thought that perhaps they'd forget about the incident, embarrassed to have over-reacted to something that was obviously a joke (seriously...a cartoon chicken head?!?).

No one said anything for most of the day and then, Karen, the store manager who for no apparent reason had always hated Emily and I summoned me to the back of the store and the LP office.

Abe, the blacker-than-black ex-Navy Seal with bloodshot eyes yelled at me awhile, trying to make me break down and cry or something. I started laughing at one point instead because he looked so ridiculous. He eventually gave up and put me on the phone with someone at the corporate HQ who informed that, in review of the incident, Elder-Beerman had decided to "terminate" me. They didn't say "terminate employement." They said "we've decided to terminate you." Heh. They then went over some paperwork, I handed in my badge, and they actually escorted me to the my locker and then out of the building.

I picked up extra hours skating at the ice rink for the rest of the summer, enjoyed myself, and then went to work at Best Buy once the school year started. Since that was my only real cashiering experience, I had to list Elder-Beerman on my application and also tell the Best Buy manager who interviewed me the story of how I was fired. He laughed about it and told me that I was hired, though I should probably avoid stalking anyone in the future. In a few months, Emily had quit Elder-Beerman and gotten a job at Best Buy, in the music department.

Abe the Loss Prevention Guy turned up at one of the ShopKo stores that I worked for. I was in the pharmacy so I'm sure he was watching me but he never recognized me at The Stalker, or if he did he never said anything to me about it.

The second time that I was fired was by Utrecht Art in Washington D.C. I am prone to terrible sinus infections and had to call in sick for two days in a row. One day was mostly spent figuring out where my Wisconsin HMO would let me go see a doctor without it costing excessive amounts of money. The pain was so bad that I was crying and I had followed the store policy for absence due to illness by calling in. I arrived back from GW University Hospital with a prescription for antibiotics to find a message on my answering machine from the store manager, firing me. On my answering machine. Classy.

The District of Columbia decided that wasn't a legitimate reason for firing me and I got a blessed 30+ weeks of unemployment compensation. The best part was that I had worked for the entire year and my summer job had been fairly high paying, so when all was factored in, I made more through unemployment than I had at the job I'd been fired from at Utrecht. I traveled to Mardi Gras in Louisiana with my friends, lived in a tent in my friends' basement for a month or so, visited my friend Alisa in North Carolina, went on tour to the West Coast with my boyfriend/got married in Vegas, and generally lived the best days of my life on unemployment.

lemur68 wrote:

burun wrote:I was let go from my statistical analysis/consumer survey gig (the second worst job in my life)

What was the first?

Working for Innovations in Wallcovering, filling out paperwork, doing inventory, answering insane questions from interior designers.

The product was vinyl wallcovering, with names like Lonhide (fake leather), Lonrib (stripes) and in nasty "designer" colors. It was down the street from Tramps, so I used to go see shows right after work.

Good things about that job: One of the designers we worked with had an office in the same building as Matador Records, so I got to visit those guys whenever I dropped off samples. I also got to visit our "big clients", namely Express/Limited, and the Trump hotels in Atlantic City.

In high school I worked at an Ace Hardware outside of Chicago despite knowing fuck all about any hardware related issues. Employed by said Ace I was in charge of mixing paint, making keys, etc. I "worked" there with two good friends, and a bunch of chain smoking older "ladies". The manager was the most spineless, dweeby guy I have ever met and his name was Ron. When Ron would ask us to do something we would literally say "fuck you, Ron" and not do it, and he would not say shit about it. We would make keys that never fit locks, mix paint that was never the right tint, etc. We built a break room in the stock room in the middle of boxes and would take turns sleeping for hours at a time. We built extravagent and inspired pipes and bongs from the plumbing parts, we smoked tons of grass in the back during our shifts...all in all it was a perfect job.
So the firing part...before a busy weekend in the summer, we decided to mop the floors not with a mixture of the regular bleach + water, but with the new mixture of 2pts water + 1pt ARMOR ALL. ARMOR ALL, she is shiny. ARMOR ALL she smells pretty. Most of all though ARMOR ALL she is slippery. Once the floors dried, it was like an ice rink. Customers slipped and sometimes fell as soon as they walked in the door, even with the yellow slippery floor signs every few feet. The store had to be shut down almost one full weekend so that the floors could be professionally cleaned.
So long story less long, Ron found out what we had done and told us he was going to have to let us all go. We said fuck you, Ron we were just trying to make the floors shiny. He then actually let us stay on until there was a complaint about us to the regional manager by some of the other employees a few days later. The regional manager then came to our store, found out what all had been going on and fired Ron and us on the spot.

When I was twenty or so and loafing about after dropping out of college and moving to LA, I got a job telemarketing for AT&T. My friend and I were selling the "Reach out America Plan" over the phone to unsuspecting AT&T subscribers. The plan was a scam, I realized this once while trying to sell it a person who had already cancelled it after comparing his bills over a few months. The plan was rigged to give cheaper rates on 'off' hours and then really stick it to ya during peak hours.

To get hired there we had to sit through a six week training program that was boring as hell. A bunch of college kids were there too and I assumed we were all hired. When the class was over, they gave us a 'quiz' and about a third of the class failed and were terminated on the spot. I was stunned that I passed as I slept through a lot of it and class-clowned the rest of the time. Some of these people were crying and stuff over losing the gig.

After a few months of working there, we started really screwing around, switching floors and desks and just being fuck-up's. One day, after leaving my floor, I came back to my cubicle to find my supervisor sitting in my desk. She asked, "You don't really want to work here do you?" I answered "no" and was escorted out of the building.

Right after that we started delivering flyers door to door for a company called Molly Maid. Got bit by a dog and started early morning drinking before flyer delivery. Got fired after the boss found a bunch of flyers in a dumpster close to his office.

my sister has been fired from every kind of job imaginable. my favorite story is that at one point she was hired to pierce the ears of little girls at the mall, despite having absolutely no qualifications for this sort of thing. on the second day she came home early and said she was fired. we asked what happened, and she said this angry mom came in with a tearful 8-year-old. my sister aimed the gun and pierced one ear very poorly, which led to the child dissolving in tears and the mother admonishing everyone within earshot. my sister said she was so nervous at that point that when the second ear came within view, she just sort of closed her eyes and shot the gun in the general direction of the girls' ear lobe.

i think my sister has probably been fired from 20+ jobs over the last 4 years, and it's always interesting to hear her stories.

thyklopth wrote:West Lakeview Liquors

You must have fucked up at that place. I've been in there enough over the years to see how they treat their workers, and to me the owners seem totally cool and supportive.

I don't have any interesting tales to tell as I've had the same job since I was 23, but I remember when I quit the job before that (giving two weeks notice and all) I got a strange letter a few months later basically saying I was being taken off the schedule due to a recent lack of hours worked, and that I was welcome to re-apply when it was convenient for me. WTF--I told them I was quitting and never coming back.

I must be a square. I've never been fired or pushed out anywhere. Exciting.

I did quit once when I was the only waiter at a 27 four-top Caribbean Restaurant in Richmond. The owner was illiterate, under the gun from the IRS, an insane and a rude bitch. On a friday night in 1995, she broke two beer bottles and spilled a gallon jug of Mayonnaise on the floor, commanding me to clean up her mess so she could stir her Jerk Chicken and watch soap opera reruns on TV in the kitchen. I was the only waiter that night and the place was quite packed. I grabbed my keys and walked out, telling her to go fuck herself on the way out.

The restaurant closed about a year later and that satanic bitch had a heart attack and died.

btcol wrote:In high school I worked at an Ace Hardware outside of Chicago despite knowing fuck all about any hardware related issues. Employed by said Ace I was in charge of mixing paint, making keys, etc. I "worked" there with two good friends, and a bunch of chain smoking older "ladies". The manager was the most spineless, dweeby guy I have ever met and his name was Ron. When Ron would ask us to do something we would literally say "fuck you, Ron" and not do it, and he would not say shit about it. We would make keys that never fit locks, mix paint that was never the right tint, etc. We built a break room in the stock room in the middle of boxes and would take turns sleeping for hours at a time. We built extravagent and inspired pipes and bongs from the plumbing parts, we smoked tons of grass in the back during our shifts...all in all it was a perfect job.
So the firing part...before a busy weekend in the summer, we decided to mop the floors not with a mixture of the regular bleach + water, but with the new mixture of 2pts water + 1pt ARMOR ALL. ARMOR ALL, she is shiny. ARMOR ALL she smells pretty. Most of all though ARMOR ALL she is slippery. Once the floors dried, it was like an ice rink. Customers slipped and sometimes fell as soon as they walked in the door, even with the yellow slippery floor signs every few feet. The store had to be shut down almost one full weekend so that the floors could be professionally cleaned.
So long story less long, Ron found out what we had done and told us he was going to have to let us all go. We said fuck you, Ron we were just trying to make the floors shiny. He then actually let us stay on until there was a complaint about us to the regional manager by some of the other employees a few days later. The regional manager then came to our store, found out what all had been going on and fired Ron and us on the spot.

None of this is funny, you just sound like an asshole