I applied for a warehouse job and the interviewer loved me and my resume and said I was hired, I just had to fill out a basic literacy test. I was studying at university so it was a silly thing to ask but he said it’s just a formality; they have to do it.

One question said “describe yourself in three sentences”. I wrote something like “I am very punctual. I enjoy stacking boxes. I’m a self starter. I always do more than asked.” Get it? It’s four sentences but they asked for three. The fourth one being about doing more than asked. Funny right?? Yeah the interviewer called me back saying head office didn’t find it funny and I was disqualified for failing the literacy test.

I figured I dodged a bullet because it must suck to work for a bunch of people without a sense of humour!

I refused to return to office.

I shit all over the manager (figuratively) in front of everybody after one of their outbursts.

Full disclosure: This was at a fast food restaurant I applied for a job at with the intent of fucking with 2 of the shittiest managers I’ve ever witnessed after stopping for a burger one time. Did it on a whim and it was quite a bit of fun. 10/10, would recommend. Plus, I got paid to do it.

I told my boss that I was going to have to reduce my hours back to weekends only because college was starting back up again which meant I couldn’t do week day shifts, so they put me down for two mid week shifts and didn’t tell me about them, then they used that as an excuse to fire me.

Not actually fired, but I just resigned from a relatively high paying career position without something lined up.

I work in tech, and some parts of that market are very much in flux due to AI disruption. For this company it led to a shuffle and, in my opinion, a lot of people ending up in roles they shouldn’t be in.

A few things happened during that shuffle. First, I was overlooked for a promotion that otherwise seemed in the bag (to the point where others were equally confused). Ultimately the person who ended up as my boss really should not be where they are. They don’t understand the business and started making other bad decisions without even consulting the team of experts on hand. In fact, they apologized to me for “starting off on the wrong foot”, but the damage was largely done, and they kept making really bad calls anyway – calls which put the team constantly at risk and kept things very inefficient.

And yes, of course they are good friends with the new CEO.

That exacerbated a lot of issues we already had with constantly juggling tasks and chronic understaffing. After that promotion snub, plus being one of the few really holding things together anyway, I realized that the stress of the position entirely outweighed the stress of finding another job. Obviously I also felt like upward mobility was no longer a thing. I was dreading work every morning. I started to get really bad anxiety. I wanted to find something else, but my mental state was such that I didn’t have the drive to seek alternatives or interview while also working at this place. I asked to reduce my weekly workload for a while, and when it wasn’t working too well, I asked to go on leave to try and combat the burnout. New boss was instantly waffling on approval, so I felt I had no other realistic option but resignation.

My wife and I are in a pretty secure financial position, and she’s got her own job that is going well. It is the first time in my life I have resigned from a position without anything lined up, which admittedly does feel weird. Taking some time for better mental health, then to hone a few skills, then will be returning to market.

I had a panic attack at work and a coworker heard me cursing through tears.

In fairness, I’m sure hearing variations on “fuck damn ass piss shit fuck fuck” over and over was annoying.

Took too much unlimited PTO. All of it approved too. Idk.

Bug in the new point-of-sale software that the managers couldn’t fix caused a small (under $200) sale to not process correctly. Was terminated for money mismanagement. Mgmt was so incompetent that they lost one of their best sellers, and ended up paying me unemployment through the lockdown because they couldn’t defend the termination to the unemployment office.

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I finally made a vague comment pushing back against my boss’s fucking unhinged conspiracy theories and shitty beliefs after being forced to hear him spout it for nearly a year.

“Wow, Wayne. I thought you were against the government regulating what people should do with their bodies. Huh… but okay.”

He turned purple, didn’t talk to me for the rest of the day, and never put me on the schedule after that.

Their entire business closed down a few months ago. I feel bad for were the ladies working there & my one co-worker. They were all part of the same church/religion, and they all basically cowered before Wayne. Wayne was an asshole who treated them all terribly. He was just mad that I didn’t let him treat me the same way.

They also didn’t want to give me more than 18 hours per week or raise my pay up from 12$ an hour for the highly specialized job I was doing.

Good riddance, Wayne.

I started a job at a regional bank on a team that was responsible for integrating the data from newly acquired banks into their systems. The team was overworked and definitely needed more hands on deck, but they didn’t have time to train anybody new on the process. Aside from that, the organization of the team was pretty poor.

When I started, they seemed unaware that I was supposed to be starting that day, so they didn’t have a desk or anything ready for me. So that first day was a bit of a wash. The second day, they put me at a desk on the floor above the rest of my team. That was also the only time that I met the manager who hired me. It seemed like people mostly forgot about me because I didn’t really get any work assigned until a couple weeks in.

They wanted me to make one of their mapping documents (which appeared to be a SQL statement copied into a Word document with every detail meticulously documented across twenty pages). I didn’t have any idea where to start with it. The next day, they said that there is no way I could do that without training, so they took the assignment away. Over the next couple of months, I’d bring up that I didn’t have anything to work on at every morning meeting. But other than that, I just spent my day editing Wikipedia articles.

Eventually they keyed in on the fact that they were paying me $90k per year to do nothing, so they fired me. They said it was probably their fault for hiring somebody without banking experience. I don’t think banking experience would have helped.

Oh yeah, and the meeting where I was fired was also where I found out that the person firing me was my team lead.

I once was working as an apartment maintenance guy for a property in Colorado. During the interview I made it clear that I wasn’t looking to move into a high responsibility role immediately and that I wanted to spend some time familiarizing myself with some more specific types of repair before going into any sort of management track. The interviewer seemed to like that answer given my previous experience and resume and I was hired.

A few months later, I made a mistake because I was asked to take a tech from the local utility around to every single unit on the property. Originally the property manager told me I’d have three days to do the work, but I was pressured to do it faster so that the tech could make a flight to his next job. We were installing batteries in water meters, which required the unlocking and opening of water heater closets on resident balconies. The residents did not have a key to their closet and were not allowed access. The closets did not use doorknobs either. They were held shut by the deadbolt locks. That night a storm rolled in. The resident called the on call service complaining that the wind was blowing the door open, but the on-call tech told them to put something in front of the door to keep it shut and that we would be by in the morning to lock the deadbolt. They didn’t do as they were asked and their pipes froze, causing a flood in the unit below them.

Later that day, I was asked to hand over my keys. As I was getting them detached from my personal keys, the property manager told me that she felt that she was “sold a bill of goods” that I hadn’t lived up to and that she had hired me because i had looked like “management track material.” I told her that in the interview with the maintenance manager I said that I wanted a learning experience and that I wasn’t ready for management. I told them I had never lied to them and left the property.

A week later I had applied for and was interviewing for a new job at another property. My phone rang during the interview. I silenced it and apologized to the interviewer but carried on. After the interview I listened to the voicemail that my old boss had left. “When we offered you the job I had you mixed up with someone else. We hired the wrong person.”

If it happens, it will be because of ADHD

The owner was an alcoholic. Her husband sent her to rehab. She came back hating men (both me and her husband). My wife worked for them at the time and we were getting a divorce. She fired me and kept my wife on the payroll

Refused to turn up to an unpaid yet compulsory training session while on my probation period. I think I dodged a bullet.