Bosses Share Their Most Satisfying Firing Stories of Bad Employees

How many hours a week do you spend in the workplace? Many of us spend more time at work than anywhere else. Often it’s either a hit or a miss, if you’re lucky sometimes you even end up somewhere in between.

At the limo company I used to work for, there was this one employee who was always breaking minor rules (ex: wearing jeans when we were supposed to wear slacks, showing up five minutes late every day, etc). These were not fireable offenses but they were annoying.

She was also constantly complaining about how hard it was to be in college (she was taking one online class), have a job, and have a kid. She also never shut up about her baby daddy drama. Basically, all of her problems were self-inflicted but she complained about them constantly.

So one day I was at work and had already been there almost eight hours when about six people called in for the night for various reasons (I ended up working about a 21-hour shift that day). This particular girl (we’ll call her Jennifer) called in sick, saying her daughter has lice, she picked her up early from school, and she can’t leave the house until both she and the kid get checked.

This should have been our first red flag since it was Saturday but we were so swamped that day that this fact was overlooked. This girl knew all the limos and buses would be downtown that evening. So, at about 9:00 that night, we were so busy that the owner of the company had to drive a group in one of our party buses.

I have a friend who works at a jewelry store with an accountant who they had to report to the feds—for the craziest reason. It turns out the accountant had faked most of her references to get the job. She then used the business bank account to buy hundreds of dollars worth of intimate toys on Amazon.

I had an employee who was an addict. He also thought he was smooth enough to swipe merchandise and sell it behind the store. I sat through six tapes worth of security footage, and in one of them, you can very clearly see him snorting something off of one of the boxes in the storeroom and then slumping over for fifteen minutes.

I was a supervisor at a summer camp and one time we had a field trip to a theme park. I gave the staff a pep talk explaining the various methods to not lose a child (ex, buddy system, numbering the kids, having them hold a rope, etc). The counselor in charge of the six-year-olds did none of those things.

During the summer, I managed the mowing crew at a large park. I had a few stoner kids but I really didn’t care as long as they cut the grass. I had this one kid who was assigned to cut the grass along the road outside of the park.

He drove the mower out at 8:00 am and by noon he was still gone. I started to worry when he wasn’t back by 4:00 p.m. I drove out in the pickup and saw that the grass had been cut all the way along the road to the on-ramp for the highway. I followed the grass-cutting trail—30 km (17 miles) later there was the kid on the side of the highway.

I told a very poorly performing employee to take a paid day off and think about whether this job was a good fit for him. I called him after the day off and he said, “This is definitely the right place for me”. I told him to take another day and think about it some more.

I was the night manager at a Subway, and with that title came very little added responsibility. However, I did have the ability to fire people at my discretion if I had just cause. Well, this one girl was downright disgusting.

I never micro-managed my employees and I always gave them a lot of discretion in how they did their jobs. However, when I got a new contract-to-hire guy who was gone from his desk way too much, I decided to investigate.

I used my admin credentials to log onto his computer and check out what he was working on. I looked into his emails and bingo! There was a message where he told a girl that he parks his car in the basement away from everyone and he goes there to nap.

I work at a residential facility for at-risk youth. One time, I caught the supervisor sleeping with an adolescent. I told the supervisor to go home and wait for the authorities.

A job I had back in 2003 once gave me the task of flying out to a city I’d never set foot in, firing the entire crew, and hiring and training a whole new crew. I had never met these people before in my life. I wasn’t even told why these people needed to go.

All I knew was that I was making $20/hour (which was a lot then) to do this. I felt horrible. I felt like the lowest human imaginable. One of the women cried. She said she would lose her apartment if she lost this job. I never want to do that ever again.

It doesn’t matter if it wasn’t my fault that these people were let go, it felt like it was my fault. And I don’t want to feel like that. Some people can deal—I can’t. Unlike George Clooney’s character in Up in the Air, though, I wasn’t trained to do this.

I employed a nurse and nurse assistant who both threatened and hit elderly patients. I was very happy to walk both of these people out of our facility.

I was the head lifeguard while working at a summer camp and one of my employees was new. Normally, we all knew each other because we had been working there for years. I was shocked to discover this new guy must have faked his certification. It was actually so embarrassing to watch.

He couldn’t swim a quarter of a mile, couldn’t surface dive below three meters (10 feet), and had no clue how to do anything. We did training and he nearly drowned me when I was a practice victim because he had me in a headlock with my face underwater. I had to start punching him because he wouldn’t let go.

Eventually, one day, a kid started actually drowning and this new guy was standing around. One of our lifeguards-in-training started screaming and jumped in to save the kid. Naturally, the trainee got pulled down by the drowning victim and my new employee was STILL just standing there, chilling.

I few years ago, I was a security guard supervisor for the NASCAR campgrounds. After trying to get ahold of one of my new guards on the radio for about 20 minutes, I assumed he had fallen asleep. He was supposed to be sitting in his car at a somewhat remote guard post.

I had a cashier who worked for me for about a year. He never did his job. If he went out into the store, he’d tell other employees that he was finished all his work and that I’d sent him to help them. He would then follow them around idly chatting and preventing them from working.

He would ask his friends to come in and shop so he could “help” them for what would sometimes be over an hour. On several occasions, I caught him actively hiding. I couldn’t prove any of this, and my boss was constantly furious with my shift (and subsequently me) for requiring hours of overtime every night trying to catch up with the work the kid didn’t do.

One night, feeling angry and more than a little spiteful, I refused to let the kid leave until he’d finished his work. He whined and cried that his ride was outside waiting and that he wouldn’t be finished for hours. I told him tough luck, he should have finished his job earlier, then, and went into the office to do manager things. Then I heard voices.

I used to do mechanical maintenance at a brewery in New Zealand while I was studying. Out of the blue, a chain on one of the conveyors kept coming off, and it was very difficult to put it back on.

When this happened, it usually meant that the packaging line needed to be shut down, and all the staff were sent home early with pay. We were at a loss as to what was causing the chain to keep coming off so we decided to set up a camera. That’s when we learned the disturbing truth.

I fired a guy by telling him he was obviously too skilled to work under me and should be running his own kitchen.

I got my boss fired. I worked at a restaurant and we would order uniforms and retail shirts that we sold to customers every month. I put away the items in order, and then the next day I saw that the retail shirts were all gone.

When I asked my boss about it, he got weird and then said he gave them away to the crew. I didn’t question it, because he was my boss. The next day, he sat me down and wrote me up for checking my email on a work computer. The company policy was to not go to a website you wouldn’t show your mother.

I started to realize that he was just trying to find excuses to fire me. So I asked some of the crew members if they had been given t-shirts. No one had. That’s when I got suspicious. I looked at the security video from the day before and saw the boss was leaving with a big garbage bag full of something.

I once hired this guy who was so absolutely sure that he always was the smartest guy in the room when, in actuality, he was quite stupid. However, I needed employees in the yogurt shop I owned, so I kept him on making sure to only give him shifts when I was in the building.

One time, a group of his friends came in after one of his shifts and I knew trouble was coming. They all had loyalty punch cards, which I’m sure he supplied and punched out, so I had to give them whatever they wanted for free—strike one.

Another time, I had to leave the building when he was working and I came back to nothing having been rung up for an entire hour, yet the register had been opened over a dozen times, which was clearly theft (and strike two).

I found out that my assistant manager was a serious addict who was taking money from the registers and regularly using substances in the bathrooms. But that wasn’t the worst part. One morning, she had a hit-and-run accident at 4:00 am and came to work right after.

At noon, officers showed up, cuffed her, and took her to the station. As they were taking her away, she told the other employee to lie to me and tell me she was sick in the bathroom when I called. Luckily, that employee called me instead. I came in and sent that employee home while HR and I figured out what to do.

I used to be a manager at a FedEx office and had recently been switched to work in a new location. It was 24 hours so it had to be staffed around the clock. I spent the first week or two trying to get in tune with the flow of things and noticed that all the night duties weren’t getting done.

I decided to dig a little deeper—and came to a shocking realization. I found out that every day, our main graveyard shift guy would spend his first two hours getting some of his work out of the way, then he would sit down at one of the computers and go online.

When I had to fire someone, all she did was cry. Even though she had been given three verbal warnings and three written warnings, she still tried to blame everyone around her. She then accused me of inappropriate behavior and harassment.

Luckily for me, the security supervisor had been outside the open conference room door the whole time. I was also glad that the room I fired her in was under camera surveillance.

This one time, I witnessed an employee throwing his girlfriend into the wall in the breakroom and was like “WHAT THE—? You can’t do that, man!” He told me that it was none of my business. Unfortunately for him, I was both of their supervisors and it was, in fact, my business.

So, after about five minutes of threats, I locked myself and his girlfriend in an office and called law enforcement. I then came out and tried to reason with him until I saw the authorities pull in the drive. Right around the same time, he took his shirt off, threw it at me, and said, “Meet me outside if you’re a real man!” and stormed out.

I once fired a co-supervisor for punching a 16-year-old female employee in the eye because she threw an ice cube down his shirt. It felt good to send that jerk packing—or it DID until he went to the regional office and complained. I can’t believe what they did.

When I was a manager, I had a girl working for me who was a total ditz. Luckily, the job wasn’t that hard, so at first her lack of intelligence wasn’t a big deal. One day, however, her friends came in and asked her to go somewhere.

I hired a young person who was VERY pleased with himself, to put it mildly. He had gone to the best schools and was well looked after by his mom and dad. I chose him from a large field of strong economics graduates. Red flag number one: During his first week on the job, he made a point of boasting to his ex-employer about his new job.

After six months, he was a nightmare of self-absorption. The quality of his work was very poor and he would groan audibly when asked to do any menial task. He also got into the habit of surreptitiously denigrating the people who were paying his bills (aka me) and was silly enough to print and circulate these emails internally, which my assistant often found.

This happened during my first week on the job. I was a manager and one of the employees thought I was an intern so he started complaining about management (aka me) and bragging about how he sleeps on the job and so on.

During a particular work day when he was playing World of Warcraft on his laptop in the break room, I asked him if he ever gets in trouble. He told me that the game is a diversion and he’s actually watching dirty movies.

This was an easy one for me. All I said was “Welcome back!

I have a weird one. She was a writer and every writer had to write seven articles a day. If you were diligent, you could knock one out in half an hour, it wasn’t really strenuous or anything. Anyway, some of the editors started to notice “similarities” in her work.

We found a few cases where her submissions were actually old files that she had dug out of the file share and changed the byline on. She was reprimanded about this three or four times over the course of six weeks. Each time she said she really didn’t know how it happened.

She was so convincing that we were suspecting a technical glitch or something. It was not like she changed a few sentences around, the articles were exact duplicates. A manager finally decided to dig around—and she couldn’t find a single original article submitted by this employee over the past six months.

One of my employees was selling illicit substances during her shifts at my internet cafe. I had my night guy come in with me. He went behind the counter and I asked her to come talk to me outside. She said, “Who is going to watch the till?” I told her the night guy was.

About a year ago, the health club company I worked for bought out another health club chain, and I was tasked with going to the new club and turning it around. Because the old club was bought out, I was expected to correct all of the problems.

Our club opened up at 4:00 am and within a couple of days of taking over, one of the members took a cell phone picture of my front desk check-in person sitting there on her phone. My boss emailed me the picture with the instructions to “Fix this”.

This was my first big management gig, so I had to prove to him that I had the balls to fire someone. I pulled her aside and asked her about it. She said that she was frantically trying to find someone to drive her kid to school because her car broke down. She actually traveled several miles that day to get to work by 4:00 am.

During high school, I worked at a department store. Over the years, I eventually worked myself up to the role of weekend/night manager. I had the ability to fire people, but it had to be for a “REALLY good reason”.

I had an employee, who was the same age as I, who was often spotted in her car getting it on with her boyfriend. Her breaks were supposed to be 15 minutes, but she often took much longer.

I used to be a manager at Journeys (the mall shoe store), and I always liked to lay it on thick when I was letting teenagers and early twenty-somethings go. I’d start off by telling them that because I’ve been fired before, I know what they’re going to do.

I supervised a woman who was beyond retirement age by a number of years. When I became her supervisor, I knew that it was time for her to be let go. It wasn’t because she was old, but because she just didn’t care enough to try anymore.

She slept at her desk regularly, was frequently late, left early, etc. When she was working, she made frequent mistakes and was little or no help in fixing the mistakes she had made. One of the big reasons we kept her on was that she was supposed to have extensive knowledge of a process we were updating. We were so wrong.

I worked as a supervisor for a sign-spinning company for a long time. I had permission to hire people, and although firing wasn’t in my power, my word was enough to make the person above me do it. So, in effect, I could fire people.

I fired people for reasons ranging from dirty uniforms (and I should specify that I am not strict on dress code so you had to be pretty bad), attendance, and attitude. My favorite firing was a man we will call Mr Price.

Mr Price attended one of my hiring events in Orlando, and I was desperate to assign people out in the Clermont/Groveland area. We hire people at $10 an hour but, at the time, I had the authority to give someone a temporary raise to $12 if they had to travel to a location 30 miles or more away.

My dad told me about this girl who showed up an hour or so late to work three days out of five during her first week. On the third day, he asked her why it took her so long to get there. She said, “Oh, this morning there was a lot of traffic coming from my hometown”.

My buddy Chris is an executive chef at a semi-fancy restaurant. One evening, I was walking by and saw him taking a break out back, so I walked over to chat with him. We were having an interesting conversation about movies and bicycles when one of his waitresses came out back.

“Chris! This is not fair! I wanted to take my break but Audrey said she had already switched with Wendy and so I thought it shouldn’t matter and so I went to take a break and Frank said I had to stay on the floor and it’s all so stupid!” But that wasn’t all.

She took a breath and continued, “And when I got here this morning, I know I was supposed to be rolling silverware, but I had to check in the back because Rodney said something about needing help when he’s not on the line because he’s probably in the walk-in, but Rodney wasn’t there so I went back to the front”.

I was supervising a call center in the early 2000s and we were still manually dialing numbers from paper call sheets. I had a new guy who, after a few days, still had zero success in getting anyone to do a survey. So I decided to listen in. After getting an answering machine on his first call, the second one was answered by a human:“Hello?”

I worked at a pizza place in a college town, we had a driver—let’s call him “Derrick”. The manager was also named “Derrick”. Derrick the Driver sold illicit substances on the side. It was nothing big time and he didn’t make it obvious, but most of the other kitchen staff knew.

Another driver calls in on his day off and asked to speak with Derrick. Derrick the Manager came over, picked up, and said, “Thank you for calling Pizza Place, How may I help you?”

As the manager of a movie theater, I make sure I have security cameras pointed at key areas of the business. I had one employee who would roll his eyes and straight-up argue with me about anything I asked him to do. I needed to have just cause to fire him.

One day, I asked him to do something and then headed back to my office.

I used to manage a T-shirt shop. I had an employee who was re-hired after having left years and years beforehand. When this employee was hired back, she did not receive seniority since her prior work with us had been more than five years ago. She didn’t like this.

One night while I was working alone, we were absolutely slammed and I didn’t get around to putting tags on the last 10 or so t-shirts in my pile for inventory. Clock-out time rolled around and I left a memo on the counter for the new/old employee asking her to finish tagging the last few shirts—as a sales associate, this is her job.

The next day, she sent me a four-part epic of a text message. Within the text, she straight up threatened me with bodily harm if I ever dare leave her work again. She then went on to colorfully explain that it’s not her job to do mine if I feel lazy and that I’m a sleazeball for taking her position.

I own a chain of dry cleaners. Three years ago, a month before I sold the business, I went undercover and started training with the staff as a newly hired part-time employee. We didn’t want anyone in the company to know that the business was being sold until everything went through. I couldn’t believe what I uncovered.

On my first day of a ride along with one of the delivery drivers, he showed me how he filled up the van with the company credit card while also putting $20 worth of fuel into his personal car.

When I was training with one of the store managers, she showed me how to make some extra cash. She came into work with pockets full of coupons and applied one to every other cash order after the customer left. This gave her an average of an extra $10 per hour.

Our company’s new secretary/promo model came to a Las Vegas event with us and ended up disappearing with some guy for the rest of the trip. She didn’t even fly back home with us. When she eventually showed up for work, I was given the green light to fire her.

My most satisfying “You’re fired” moment was with an employee who had been part of our family business for about four years. For three of those years, he had been surreptitiously pilfering money from us.

We finally switched over to a new accounting system and he kept doing it. The old system could only be used as soft evidence, but the new system was rock solid. Once we added up his total theft, it was just below Grade A Grand Theft for our state.

The setting for my story is a low-budget horror movie. I spent pre-production volunteering in the art department in the hope of getting my first job. Others came and went, but I hung in there. On day one of filming, another guy joined the department.

He had no trouble getting in because his dad was dating the producer. I didn’t particularly like him but I worked with him. He was very loud and opinionated and forever saying how he thought things should be done. I knew about his connection to the producer, so I just kept my mouth shut about him.

Two weeks into filming, one of the department heads came to me and asked what I thought of him. Before answering, I briefly wondered what he had been saying about me, but I just told the department head that we get along fine. A few days later, the same department head came back to me.

Not a typical employer-employee situation, but I used to care for some young children who had special dietary needs (no gluten, no dairy, limited sugar). It wasn’t a case of helicopter parents—these kids had legitimate allergies and it was very important that we followed their special diet.

Once the older child had started school, and bearing in mind that I would soon be moving out of the area, the parents decided to transition the kids into an in-home daycare that seemed great. The mother agreed that during the transition period, I would be at this in-home daycare with the kids.

I started out staying the entire time they were there. Then I would leave a little early. Then I would come late and leave early, etc. Due to their special dietary needs, the kids were sent with a variety of snacks and treats to be given to them during the week as well as daily lunch and beverage.

As a young manager at a large corporation, I was once tasked with firing the branch manager, assistant manager, and two other employees at one of the branch offices. Basically, there was a love triangle going on among these three, and upper management (from another state) wanted them all fired.

I was called on a Sunday night and told to greet them all on Monday morning with security. I also had to perform their exit interviews, which is absolutely impossible once you’ve just fired someone.

It’s never been satisfying to let somebody go. People rely on regular pay and when I fire a person, I’m taking away their ability to provide for themselves and their family. I understand that it needs to be done, and I am the one that chooses to do it because of their performance, but nobody should find that feeling satisfying.

What’s even worse is when I have to clean up another person’s mess. For example, when somebody needs to be let go because they’re underperforming or won’t fire people who have been given ample warnings and chances to get better and they expect to pick up their slack.

I had an employee who we suspected was less than perfect. This fact was confirmed, however, when I watched her preparing a customer’s meal…My jaw literally DROPPED.

I hired what I thought was a diamond-in-the-rough employee—a 40-year-old youth pastor who had some experience cleaning. Mind you, I was 23 years old and it was my first time in a management position, so I had been forewarned that it may be a little rough trying to manage someone much older than me.

Anyway, things started out fairly well as I walked him through his tasks. He seemed like an OK guy, but when I would show him little tips and things we were supposed to do, his reactions were verging on disrespectful. Eventually, toward the end of the morning, I simply asked him if he had done a part of the bathroom that we were supposed to do.

I heard this story from one of my favorite bosses. Our lead character is a particularly nasty little piece of work. He’s creepy to women and extremely gifted at alienating everyone.

He got a job as a driver on a fairly decently budgeted movie and my friend didn’t want to employ him but this guy had weaseled his way in with some of the top people. Partway into production, he got told by my friend to fill up one of the production cars with diesel and drive it back to the office.