Dumbest Thing You've Ever Gotten in Trouble for at Work

At 15 (legally too young to work) I had a job at a Baskin Robbins. (Don't ask how this was possible. It was 20 years ago.) I played tennis at the time, and one weekend I was at a tournament. I got caught up in things and at some point in the afternoon, I remembered I had a shift. I was about one hour late at that point, and had never been late or missed a shift. I immediately called, profusely apologizing and asking to come in late. I was fired on the spot (i.e. phone) for "having too much going on."

I understand missing work is a fire-able offense, but telling a 15 y.o. he has too many things non-Baskin Robbins in his life?

It's fun to remember the shitty jobs I had as a kid. This one's actually better:

Before the Baskin Robbins I worked at a pizza place across the street. Actually they just made pizzas and people took them home to cook them. But my job wasn't to make pizza, it was to wear a sandwich board (i.e. stand between two pieces of cardboard with the specials, if you've never seen Great Depression photos) in the median of a busy intersection. Obviously this sucked, so I spent a lot of time with some skateboarding friends, who somehow held down a job at a donut place despite jacking off in the bathroom (and who knows what else). So one day the boss checked on me when I was enjoying (hopefully jizz-free) apple fritters. I came back and was confronted. Thinking quickly I said I went around the block to try to get the attention of other customers. Of course this didn't fly and I was fired.

But ... he still had to pay me for the hours I supposedly worked. He tried to underpay me by doing a trick on the calculator. However I was pretty good at math then (did some competitions and now I have a physics PhD), so I caught this trick and said "no I don't think that's right." He tried again and I explained the correct order of arithmetic operations. He angrily paid me.

Great thread...

I work in a national laboratory, and was looking at something innocent but obviously not work-related. My boss noticed and joked that it was fine, but that ALL of our internet activities are tracked by the lab, including email. She told us that the IT division had found that one of her employees had looked at porn on a lab computer. So my boss had to go through the embarrassing ordeal of discussing this with her employee...

Johann Gambleputty wrote:

I don't get it. You arrived BEFORE work was supposed to start, and yet you still had to fill out paperwork documenting your excuse? Did your contract say you were expected to arrive 10 minutes early or something?

I didn't really trust the trainee supervisor not to claim I had been late, so I did the paperwork to show I had been on time. He evidently expected me to leave home 20-30 minutes earlier every and sit around the office unpaid doing nothing every morning on the off chance that the train was late, something that happened twice in my 2 1/2 years with that company.

The moral of this thread: some people are really tightasses. Then you can think about the 4-5 tightasses that have looked at this thread and scoffed at all of the un-tightass people.

Kramer: "I don't even work here"

What did he carry in his briefcase?

i got in trouble for shining my shoes with water from the water cooler

I had a pretty sweet gig, big bucks. Then I started hanging out a LOT with this pretty consultant. She was an ex-model. I had to get a little creative with some of the expense reports, since all the evenings I had out with her were not REALLY business related. Then she tried to sue me for sexual harrassment. Then she recanted the accusation.

Well, the lame-ass boardmembers didn't like this one bit. I was given a load of cash and told to go away.

BigWig.com wrote:

I had a pretty sweet gig, big bucks. Then I started hanging out a LOT with this pretty consultant. She was an ex-model. I had to get a little creative with some of the expense reports, since all the evenings I had out with her were not REALLY business related. Then she tried to sue me for sexual harrassment. Then she recanted the accusation.

Well, the lame-ass boardmembers didn't like this one bit. I was given a load of cash and told to go away.

hah!

chirt wrote:

I did about 1 hour of real, tangible work per day for over a 2 year period. The rest of my time was spent trying to find ways to not work, yet still maintain a veneer of productivity. For some reason my motivation to maintain even this mirage disappeared, and I got into trouble, was audited and was fired.

Sadly I see myself going this route. i go in trying to actually do work, but god is staring at code all day boring.

I once had a job working at a fast food restaurant in St. Louis, MO. I was an incredibly hard worker and the only person who really kept the place clean, but still not the most responsible or circumspect at that point in my life.

Once I just didn't show up for work for like 4 days. Then I waltzed in to work my shift, acting like nothing had happened. The mousy manager worked up his best angry face & asked me "where've you been." I said nothing, just kept working. The matter never came up again and I wasn't fired or even written up. Any co-workers who asked ,I told them I had been abducted by a UFO.

pissed in the kitchen sink at work. both bathooms were full and i was about to explode since i hydrate well for my runs.

Was stationed in Germany as a Military Police. Had a Platoon Sergeant that was a royal prick..(most need to be).

Took a PT Test and ran 9:39 for the 2 mile which, according to my level of fitness at the time was about right. Several months later I took another PT test about 10 days after running the Frankfurt Marathon and ran 10:03. Mind you this still is a max score for my age group at the time for the PT Test. However, in my Platoon Sergeants eyes, I had failed to improve and he verbally counseled me on my lack of self improvement and considered a written counseling statement. Luckily I had a squad leader who told him to piss up a rope!

True Story!

Another story from the same company:

They paid commuting costs based on the price between the station closest to the office and the one physically closest to your home. The nearest station for me was about a 10 minute walk down a major road. After I'd been working there for about a year the manager, a nice guy and the predecessor of the trainee jerkoff, called me into his office apologetically and said that someone in the administration office had measured the distance from my apartment to surrounding stations using GPS and found that the next station on the line was about 5 meters closer as the crow flies than the one I had said was the closest. News to me as I had never been to that station. It didn't matter that it was a longer walk to get there because I would have had to zigzag on a bunch of little streets, it was physically closer and so they were going to retroactively deduct a year's worth of the 40 cent difference per day from my next paycheck and give me a letter of reprimand for falsely reporting my travel expenses. The manager guy was pretty sorry about it, but that was how it went.

The thing was, three days a week they sent me out to a client's to do some outservice work. Going from the station they said was closer to my apartment cost about $4 more per round-trip than the station I had claimed as my base, meaning I had actually been saving them money overall, but they didn't say anything about retroactively paying me the year's worth of extra money.

I worked up a spreadsheet showing that they were defrauding me several hundred dollars and gave it to the manager. He looked at it and said, "Oh man, I don't know what they were thinking." They docked the 40 cents a day from my next paycheck but took months to add the $4 x 3 days a week.

Ghost of Ashenfelter wrote:

I got in trouble for catching two of my students cheating on an assignment.

Same! Except it was 5 students, who in all other contexts, willingly admitted to cheating.

I was in the wrong -- see -- because I worked in an integrated school and "Why should you be going after kids like mine?" (that is, white kids).

Parents complained hard enough and I was the one who had to do the explaining. Apparently, I shouldn't have said "cheating" or "academic dishonesty" but something more euphemistic. "Copying answers?" Or -- rather, the giveaway -- copying WRONG answers.

I worked at an amusement park when I was in HS and I thought I was a really funny guy. One of the team leaders's name was Gina and I decided it would be AWESOME if I wrote the letters VA in front of her name on her Id badge. (VaGina). Needless to say it was funny until the supervisors and managers came into the gift shop I worked in and saw this. I didn't get hired back the next summer.

The janitor should have gotten in trouble, not you. It would have taken 20 seconds to twist the hot water nozzle and get rid of the ice. It probably took him more than 20 seconds to complain.

Therefore, he was wasting time on the job.

Tell your kids to throw the ice into the garbage can, then the janitor has to lift super heavy bags.

Dr. Johnny Fever wrote:

I said "booger" on the air.

Actually these days you can say booger.... But you can't say *&(^(*%$(&^$#**^&$(*&^%)(*^_)(*!