Marsupialized wrote:I saw a dude get fired for attempting to murder a coworker at a pizza place I worked at in high school.

I totally thought it was gonna be the christian that snapped.

Marsupialized wrote:

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

Don't worry new guy, Marsupialized's online persona = complete asshole.

I thought your story was the funniest one...but I also worked at an ACE Hardware store. Chain smoking? Check. Bongs made out of plumbing equipment? Check. I was a somewhat competent employee though...despite knowing "fuck all" about hardware. I smoked grass on my own time though...and not out of PVC pipes.

Where was this particular ACE Hardware?

when i was about 23, i was working as a small claims clerk. this was my first straight job, with the button down shirts and the no funny haircuts etc. i didn't really enjoy it, but i needed health insurance and the money was unbelievable -- $ 16,000 a year.

i worked with a gaggle of midwestern women. some of them chain-smoked. some of them were into little league. one of them told me that "some days i just feel like a taz!" special people, one and all. not too sure what to make of the guy that's got a master's degree and spiky hair and multiple piercings in his ear. not sure at all.

they teach me how to do the various things that a small claims clerk does. this was back in the late 90s, so a lot of things were still done on paper. anything that wasn't done on paper was done on green screen vft terminals - no windows 98 here, let alone basecamp or google documents.

one of my tasks was to type up the dockets. this was done in months in advance. so i was first being trained on this in september. all i had to do was type two names on each line. somebody somewhere would print this a few months in the future and give it to the small claims judge, post it in various parts of the building, i think they may have published some of the listings in the local newspaper, etc.

so it's september, and i have to enter a shit ton of dockets. as training. fine, whatever. i type them all in. i type pretty quickly - say, around 70 wpm. way faster than these women are expecting me to type. so i'm done with my work, dicking around on the vft green screen terminal, trying to learn my way around. i end up typing in a bunch of fake dockets. just testing things out in the system. totally erase my work, no big deal.

about three months later, it's 8:30 in the morning and the judge flies into the small claims office with a piece of paper in her hand. fucking furious. wants to know who the hell submitted a docket full of WOLFMAN VS DRACULA, FRANKENSTEIN VS APEMAN, JACKASS VS JACKASS, etc.

guess i didn't totally erase my work after all.

That seems like an honest mistake, hench. Admittedly, I've never heard it called this before:

hench wrote:some of them were into little league.

I'd see the shit out of a band called "Into Little League."

garble wrote:That seems like an honest mistake, hench.

it was a reasonably honest mistake. i've often wondered whether they used it as an excuse to fire me since i was taking hella advantage of my health insurance while still on my six month probationary period (getting treated like crazy for the arm and wrist and back and shoulder pain that i'd earned myself through twenty years' worth of classical piano study).

still. lots of farmers and deadbeats in the courthouse that morning, wondering whether they were 'JACKASS' or 'BATMAN.' i probably would have fired me too...

Minotaur029 wrote:

Marsupialized wrote:

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

Don't worry new guy, Marsupialized's online persona = complete asshole.

I thought your story was the funniest one...but I also worked at an ACE Hardware store. Chain smoking? Check. Bongs made out of plumbing equipment? Check. I was a somewhat competent employee though...despite knowing "fuck all" about hardware. I smoked grass on my own time though...and not out of PVC pipes.

Where was this particular ACE Hardware?

Crystal Lake - ACE paint and hardware on NW HWY - now defunct.

You think that purposely cutting bad keys, mixing the wrong paint, and turning the floor into an ice rink is 'funny'?

keys - more lack of training, we tried to make good ones, but it was kinda hard, and I genuinely felt bad when the people came back and told us that they didn't work

paint - usually the folks we mixed it for could tell that it was the wrong shade when they looked at the dry strip and would have it remixed - again mainly due to lack of training

"ice rink floor" - asshole move, but I was 16 and it was funny at the time

When I was retelling this story, it occured to me that I could be posting it in the "dick moves that you have pulled" thread.

Frank Decent wrote:Wow. That's a great/horrifying story.

My story of getting fired from Zellers for sleeping in the bedding isle is very pathetic, especially compared to captain frying pan.

nope, that one rules too.

also: "some days i just feel like a taz!"

amazing.

So I got a job at a porn video shop. It's the porn video shop on 103rd and Harlem, over by the courthouse. Hillcrest adult book and video.
There were no books, just videos.
This was many years ago, I was living and attending community college near there, I was also working at UPS loading trucks in Willow Springs overnights along with the internship back up in the city at a record label 2 days a week I had gotten. On top of it I was smoking pot and taking pills pretty steadily.
You know what, steadily is not the word I was looking for...Constantly, that's a better word. I was smoking pot and taking pills constantly.

As you can imagine I was very tired, on edge and cranky all the time. The UPS alone is enough to kill a man let alone doing homework and fighting rush hour traffic both ways all the way up into the city twice a week to stuff CD's in envelopes and get talked down to for no money and a few free records. Records they'd make a huge deal out of if I sold like I betrayed them or something. Sorry, I'm hungry and this record sucks and I will never listen to it.
I needed cash, I was so broke and I had nowhere to live. School had wiped out my cash resources and I had gotten caught cheating on the girl I was living with/sponging off of so she kicked me out. The girl I was cheating with....it wasn't that kind of thing, I couldn't move over there. I didn't even know her name. I really didn't. She probably told me at some point but I'm no good with that shit, I just called her 'baby' all the time. She sucked anyway.
Anyhow, my solution was to just be either at work or at school at all times till I could afford my own pad or find somewhere to live.
I'd sneak in 5 minutes of sleep here and there where I could. I'd take a lot of speedy pills and just ride it out.

I was a few weeks into that regimen when I got the porn store job so I was not thinking clearly right off the bat.
The two guys that owned the place were the walking definition of 'creepy'
One was a midget, and not a regular midget...one of those REALLY small midgets. came up to about my waist. He didn't have the midget look to him either, with the oddly shaped body...he looked like someone took a regular man and just shot him with a shrink ray. His voice constantly sounded like he had just sucked down a helium balloon. Something straight out of the wizard of oz. Except he was perpetually filthy and stunk to high heaven.
His boyfriend or whatever the fuck they had going on was all kinds of fucked up. He had some disease where his body was all twisted up and he couldn't speak without stammering his words and spitting all over. It'd take him a good 10 minutes to walk 5 feet from the front counter to the back room. It'd take him 20 more minutes to tell you that he wanted you to vacuum the place. That's what you'd think he was trying to say anyway.
They had poodles as well. They'd bring in these enormous poodles who'd run around the store. You think of a poodle as being a small dog but apparently there's a type of poodle that is enormous, and mean. These things scared the shit out of me and everyone else who came in.

Anyhow, I work there awhile and eventually they trust me enough to give me the keys and have me work alone. I would open up at 10am and work all day till 2am when they closed 2 days a week. That was perfect because I had nowhere else to go anyway and it fit into the jigsaw puzzle that was my appointment calender at that point.

Right around the time they gave me the keys was the time I was getting to become really disgusted by the job and really was not that interested in keeping it any longer. I'd had my laughs. It was just depressing at this point. Add into the mix I'd had no slept in oh, 3 or 4 weeks at this point and it's a recipe for disaster.

So on my two days a week, Tuesday and Thursday they had a special going. All videos were 1 dollar to rent. You have no idea the filth and scum that slither out from beneath their rocks to take advantage of such a promotion.

I would get there at 10 am and there was a line of people waiting. A long line. All impatiently looking at their watches and fidgeting around.
They surround me and talk shit the second I got out of my car about how they were getting worried I wasn't going to show and did I reserve the video they wanted for them and blah blah blah. Every single one had booze on their breath and their clothes smelled like mildew and cigarette smoke. I can still smell it right now as I'm thinking about it.
Made me want to vomit. Every day I would just ignore them and unlock the door. I'd always turn around and lock it behind me. Every day. No matter what time it was. I'd wait till five after ten and go back and open up. Oh, that five minutes must have felt like 5 hours for these sick motherfuckers.
'You are supposed to open at ten!!'
'No, I'm pretty sure we are supposed to open at 10:05. It's some kind of law the city passed'
'It's ten!! It says it right there on the door!!'
'Thats an old sign, from before they passed the law'

They all rush in and and pick the place clean in minutes.

Every day there would be new videos, each morning they came in a big UPS box. i had to take the new ones out and prepare them to be rented. I'd enter the info into the computer and put stickers on them and whatnot.
They sit there like dogs at a butcher shop watching me open the box. I'd do my best to hide what the videos were from them.

'Are you gonna put those out today?'
'I don't know, maybe'
'Is there anything good in there?'
'Good? It's videos of people fucking like every other video here'
'Any new upskirt videos?'
'get away from me'

I would catch people jerking off in there at least once a day. I'd yell a them and chase them out. They'd show back up a half hour later like I forgot or something. I'd chase them out again and tell them they could never come back. They'd always talk to the owners and the owners would tell me to let them back in. I would and sure enough he's jerking off again two days later. Middle aged couples would come in and just start fucking right there in the middle of the store. Chase them out and it's the same shit 'you have to let them back in they are good customers, they just get off on fucking in porn shops'
Junkie hookers would come in like they were browsing and work the dudes who came in, take them out to their cars and suck them off for 20 bucks or some cigarettes or Burger King. I let the hookers do their thing because they were at least somewhat discrete about it. They had the decency to go out to the dudes car and most of them were pretty funny talking shit about the dudes.

We had every kind of disgusting video you could imagine. This was before the internet, so if you just had to see a amputee woman licking a horses cock NOW this was pretty much the only place you could get it. All kinds of illegal shit. Disgusting, vile shit.

Watching these dudes come up to the counter with 30 and 40 videos at a time just made me want to puke.

'These have to be back tomorrow you know'
'Oh, I know'
'You are gonna watch 40 videos tonight?'
'Yes'

Anyhow, time goes on and I become more and more sickened by the whole scene. One day I was snooping around the office and I found the midget's dope needles and a big ol bag of heroin. I also found a video camera in the washroom pointed at the toilet in their office. Nobody would go in there but them, they videotaped themselves shitting and pissing? Why would you do such a thing?

I start to get meaner and meaner to the customers, blatantly talking shit to them. I'd look at the videos they handed me and just wince and make a face like I was absolutely disgusted. Maybe give a disgusted 'pffft'
The dudes would just look down at the floor like they wanted to cry. I'd tell customers that they were banned from the store forever for the littlest things. For asking me what time it was. For coughing 'and spreading their disgusting fucking pervert germs all over the place'

I started making a big show of putting plastic gloves on before I'd touch a video or money they had touched, then carefully take them off and throw them away.

So one day a woman comes in, big fat woman. It's dead and she asks to use the washroom, I tell her go ahead. She comes out five minutes later butt naked. I am serious. She's butt fucking naked standing there looking at me.
'Do you think I'm sexy?'
'No, not at all. Please, just get the fuck out of here. Seriously, go. Now.'

The only attractive women who ever came in this place were a lesbian couple who'd rent gay male porn all the time. Everyone else was just a beast.

Anyway, the firing.

The owners come in one day and start bitching at me. The midget is chirping way and the gimp is spitting and swaying around. They say I took a counterfeit 50 dollar bill from one of these scumbags. I could care less. I say 'you know what, fuck you and fuck this job' and start walking out he starts yelling that he's calling the cops because I was in on it, I had one of my friends come in with a fake 50 and we stole his money.

I lost it, I turned around and grabbed him by the shirt and starting screaming at him 'You fucking little junkie piece of shit, you accuse me of stealing 50 fucking dollars?!! Fuck you, I ought to stomp your fucking midget ass into the ground'
The gimpy one starts screeching this fucked up high pitched squeal. It reminded me of, do you remember when Elliot surprised ET for the first time in the movie ET makes that weird screeching noise? That's what it sounded like. Just like it.

The midget starts punching me, he's windmilling around hitting me with his little fists on my chest and swearing at me. I push him backwards and he falls onto the ground.

I am actually fistfighting a fucking midget in the middle of a porno video store. I swear to god, these things only happen in my life. And curiously, only at points when I'm doing a bunch of drugs. When I'm sober rarely ever find myself in such situations.

So the midget gets back up and rushes at me with a little war cry, which sounded like the air being let out of a ballon. WHHEEEEEZZZZZZZZEEEE
I sidestep him and he flies against one of the shelves, knocking it over.

He stays down and I look over and the gimp is gone, he's gone into the back room. They have a gun back there. I should probably go now. I do not wanna be in this room when comes back in all herky jerky waving a pistol around.

I take off running out the door, got in my car and took the fuck off.

I moved the fuck out of that area and into the city with a friend of mine within a few days. Never heard about it again.

Wow, what a great story! I feel like I should have had to pay to read it.