Hiring Managers Share the Strangest Interviews They’ve Ever Experienced

A lot of us know how stressful it is to do a job interview. You realize that someone else has the power to make sure you can make a living, and that’s a pretty big deal.

Of course, hiring managers also run into some strange scenarios that probably make them question their life’s choices. Next time you have a job interview, remember these stories and have a little sympathy for the interviewer.

10. The Nude Livestreamer

One hiring manager did a video interview with a candidate that was nude even though he knew it was a video interview.

 “We told him we could see him and he said “sorry” then covered up with a sheet. We asked if he wanted to reschedule and he said no he was good. So yeah we decided to pass.” — Boxman 75

9. The Prima Donna

A hiring manager found a candidate who felt competent and confident. Things went south once she requested a limo and wouldn’t take anything else.

“I tell her thank you for taking the time to fly down but not even our own VPs get that treatment and to go ahead and change your ticket to fly home, now.” —blatentpoetry

8. The Teary-Eyed Candidate

Think you’ve seen everything? One candidate made things awkward by crying during the interview – three times.

“She cried three times during the interview about how much she hated her current job. My coworker had to get up and grab a box of tissues for her. When she finally calmed down, she informed us that she’ll need a special desk chair due to an injury she sustained at her current job.” —accidentalhorse

7. The Candidate Who Can DEAL With People

One interviewer received an uncomfortable reply to his question.

“The one I won’t forget is when I asked him “how well do you interact with people?” He said, “I used to be a bouncer, I know how to DEAL with people..” I immediately said okay this interview is over, thank you for your time…” —Bubblesintroubles

This bouncer didn’t get the new gig.

6. The Candidate That Should do a Podcast

It’s routine for interviewers to ask about your strengths and weaknesses.

“To start the interview, I asked him to tell us (3 people) a little bit about himself.

35 minutes later, he stopped talking. Usually people answer this question in 1-5 minutes. It was incredibly awkward and I was tempted to interrupt him but then truly wanted to see how long he would go.” —DefinitelyYoda

5. The Candidate With The Exes

No one ever wants to run into their ex at work, except a candidate that gave the names to every ex of hers that worked in the company she interviewed at.

“She listed all of her ex-boyfriends who currently worked there and said she couldn’t wait to see the look on their faces when she showed up to work.” —lovelanguage_sarcasm

4. The Interviewee That Just Didn’t Know

Going on an interview can be nerve-wracking and admitting that there’s something you don’t know can be a good thing. Just don’t do what this interviewee did:

“They answered literally every question, ‘I don’t know, man’ or ‘Can’t think of anything right now.’” —Webhead1287

3. The Hugging Candidate

Admittedly, some of us have committed certain faux-pas during the interview, but just be glad you didn’t hug your potential employer.

“My manager and I were doing this second interview, and when I called him in, he gave me a huge hug and proceeded to talk to me like I was his best friend. ” —tittyelf

2. The Stalker

Have you ever gotten lost at an interview? That could happen, just don’t do what this guy did:

“While waiting in reception, the applicant wandered into the CFO’s office. She was on the phone, so he stood in her doorway and stared at her while she was on the phone.” —fievelm

1. This Totally Inappropriate Candidate!

One hiring manager evaded a total HR problem by not hiring this candidate:

“Had a candidate who came in and asked how hot my administrator was and asked if she was single or ‘open to freaky Fridays.’” —gmabarrett

There are people who truly don’t understand how to conduct themselves during an interview. Are you a hiring manager that wants to vent about such things? Share your stories in the comments! We look forward to hearing them… or cringing along with you.

The post Hiring Managers Share the Strangest Interviews They’ve Ever Experienced appeared first on UberFacts.

21 People Explain How They Got Their Bosses Fired

This question on Reddit was quite intriguing:

“People who’ve gotten their bosses fired: how?”

Some stories were funny, and others were pretty shocking. How can people do those kinds of things in the workplace?

Here are 21 of the most interesting tales about someone getting their boss tossed out the door.

1. What an asshole!

He grabbed the back of my neck and said “If you ever say I’m wrong in front of a customer again I will beat your ass.”

I went to the GM and told him and my supervisor was relieved of his duties about 5 minutes later

2. Caught red-handed

I took a cell phone video of her taking money from the safe and putting it in her wallet. I knew she was doing it, and I also knew that the moment it came out that money was missing she’d blame it on me.

She was so stupid that she didn’t realize she should stop doing that while I was standing ten feet away with my phone out and facing her.

3. Well, that backfired!

The CEO publicly praised me for completing a task that my boss had struggled with, so my boss retaliated by forwarding all of his tasks to me in an effort to overwhelm me with work.

I actually found his job pretty manageable, which the CEO also noticed and fired him, giving me his job and office.

4. How do people think this won’t catch up with them?

It was my supervisor.

It got to the point that I had decided to quit. I had my resignation letter in my purse, but decided to let his boss know why I was quitting. Supervisor would talk about all the people on our team constantly, but only behind their backs. I got so sick of telling him to cut it out. My husband and I happened to work at the same place (different departments) and my Supervisor would make sexual comments about threesomes (with him – ewww), what hotel we picked for our afternoon delight, shit like that. It was so bloody uncomfortable. Apart from this he spent most of his supervising time outside smoking. Problem was Supervisor was “one of the guys” and I was the only girl.

Turns out his boss was disgusted, told his boss who lost his mind. They started an investigation which took three days. They interviewed staff – they corroborated what I said. They checked the security cameras, saw he was spending most of his work day outside smoking. And was fired.

When he was told he guessed (wasn’t hard!) that I was the person who complained and tried to get to me to “apologize that I took it the wrong way”. The best feeling was my co workers surrounding me as he was waled out. That was a lovely ending to it all.

5. Document everything.

Was working maintenance at an ice rink.

The rule for anyone who knows how an ice rink works is if the zamboni doors open, you get the fuck off the ice. Some dick-head decided to ignore the fact that they were open and that I was standing in the doorway, and decided to rip off one last slap-shot. The puck bounced off the glass and hit me in the head.

I was OK, but reported it to my boss, because we have to fill out an incident report for things like that. The boss asked “Are you OK?” I said I feel OK, then he responded with “Well, we don’t really have to report it then do we?” I reminded him of the protocol, but it was clear he didn’t want to do it. Since he wouldn’t do it, I sent a descriptive email of the incident up to the administration, because I felt there should be some sort of documentation/paper trail in case god-forbid I ended up having a brain hemorrhage or something a few days later.

The boss was fired by my next shift.

6. He doesn’t know how sound works?

Our desks were separated by a 5 foot cubicle wall. He was under the mistaken impression that it totally blocked sound. Thus I got to hear all his loud phone conversations, primarily his booty calls including those with his boss’s fiance. I figured it was none of my business and tried to ignore it.

Well there was a position in another department that I was interested in and as per procedure I handed in an application to my talkative boss. Didn’t hear anything further and followed up a couple of days later, only to be told that something must have happened to the application. Filled out another one and handed it in. As I return to my desk I hear the boss on the phone with a friend laughing about how he had just trashed my application again and how he was never going to let go of me.

I go to boss’s boss and angrily offer my resignation, telling him what I had just overheard, explaining that I was constantly hearing his phone calls like his booty calls like with <woman’s name> and <woman’s name> and <boss’s boss’s fiance’s name>. He got very quiet and told me to go back to my desk and he’ll take care of everything. The next day I come in and boss is gone. The day after, I have an interview with the other department (got the position).

I tend to avoid office drama, but really, he should have stuck to screwing his boss’s fiance, and not tried to screw me as well.

7. Damn! This is actually pretty vindictive…

Phoned him to tell him I won’t be at work for the rest of the week as my mum is terminally ill in hospital.

The next day (about an hour after she passed away) he phoned and asked why I wasn’t at work, I just hung up on him so I wouldn’t say anything that would get me in trouble.

The next day I sent the area-manager a Whatsap message explaining what he’d be done and attached a video of him breaking the freezer door while having a tantrum which cost the store nearly £5000 in lost stock and the repair costs (which he’d told the AM it broke on its own).

He got fired that day and I got 2 weeks off with full pay

8. Creepers gonna creep…

In college I worked in a take-out restaurant just off campus, and we were all employed by the school.

I was 17-18 years old (back in 2007/2008) and my boss, the manager, was a 40-something creeper. Hitting on me, touching me inappropriately (trying to massage my shoulders, tickling me, putting his hands on/around my waist) despite me asking him to stop. Then he friended me on Facebook, I declined, and suddenly my work schedule was changed. I was on shift during hours when I had class, and when I explained that problem, I got taken off the schedule altogether.

I told the assistant manager what was going on (which I was explicitly told by the manager not to talk to the assistant) and he reported what was going on to upper management– boom, manager was fired. I worried for a while if he was going to come after me for that.

9. Yeah, this isn’t gonna turn out well for you…

About 13-14 years ago, I was working as a web designer for a dot com. In our immediate group were a creative director, a creative manager, and 2 of us who were designers and we were all part of the marketing dept.

The creative director was a joke. Brought in by the previous VP of Marketing who he was friends with, he hardly did any work himself, and just played online poker waiting on us to send him things for approval. And he’d never stick around late when the rest of us needed to stay late to hit a deadline or deal with a crisis, etc. The creative manager, who’d been in charge for a couple years before the creative director’s hiring, still ran the day to day.

So the creative manager gave his notice that he’d accepted a new job, and when I met with the current VP of marketing to discuss transition, I mentioned that the creative director would need to step up and pull his weight. I guess a similar message was expressed by a number of people, and less than a week after the creative manager’s last day the creative director was fired!

This kind of sucked because we went down from 4 to 2 people in our group. I was appointed acting creative manager, and we eventually did hire one more designer. I left the company a couple months later, too, after the latest VP of Marketing was let go and there was going to be a 10th different person overseeing marketing in my 5 years there.

And the asshole creative director? He’d reached out at some point (looking for files for his portfolio, I think?), and it happened to be in the 2 week window where I’d accepted my next job but hadn’t yet started so I mentioned my new position. Well, he fires off a copy of his resume to the company president and tried to poach my new job out from under me! On my first day at the new job, the president mentioned that somebody else from that same company also applied for the job and forwarded me the application email to see if I knew him… saw that the date was after he and I had last communicated!

10. Turnabout is fair play!

I was fired because I “abandoned my job” while on short term disability, because wile on approved leave, they are a date for me to return, never informed me (by their own admission), and when I obviously didn’t return to work… i was fired.

The locker I had at work had my work boots in it that the company pays $90 a year towards. However there isn’t a pair under $100 available. So you always end up having some come out of your paycheck. At that point they are yours regardless of the company line. They disagreed and said they were thrown out, I reported them stolen, and the HR director responsible for getting me fired was fired.

11. A happy ending…

About 15 years ago, I worked at a major university in the IT department. After I was hired, it took me a couple of months to realize my boss was a sociopath as was his #2 guy.

Once I realized what I was dealing with, I just tried to keep my head down because I didn’t want to job hop so soon after leaving my last job. But they made that impossible.

We had a database administrator and I was interested in becoming a DBA so I talked to him a lot about what I should do to transition from a programmer to a DBA. The VP of IT, my bosses boss, would stop by and talk to me and ask me about my aspirations, so I told her about wanting to be a DBA and that I was actually taking night classes so I could. This was a woman who my boss referred to as “she who must be obeyed” in a totally disrespectful manner.

As the months went on, I saw more and more egregious behavior by my boss and his #2 toady. We had a large corporation consulting on transition to their database. This included a young guy who was doing the database install including ordering the right equipment and migrating the data.

We also had student workers in our department. They were students who worked part time hours. One of these was a young woman. The big corp young guy and the young woman started going to lunch together. Apparently this was offensive to my boss, who threatened both of them with termination for “fraternization”. The university had no such rule, my boss was just making it up as he went.

About 6 months after I was hired, the DBA quit. I went into our weekly staff meeting and at the end, my boss announces that I’d been promoted to DBA. My spidey senses were tingling because of his tone of voice and because this was the first I was hearing about it.

After the meeting, I went to his office to thank him and tell him I really appreciated the chance. He was very angry. Apparently, his boss had made him promote me. I had no idea.

The next thing I know, I’m being called into my boss’s #2 guy’s office. He tells me that performance reviews were coming up and I would have to be reviewed on job description of DBA rather than the job description of my old position. That is, unless I turned down the DBA position. Yep, he was threatening me to get me to turn down the promotion. I asked him to see the written description of my old position as well as the one for DBA. He couldn’t give them to me because they didn’t exist. Now, I can be a pretty stubborn bitch, and this really pissed me off. I didn’t do anything wrong and now my job was being threatened.

Part of my job duties during the 6 months of my employment involved working with the head of every department of the university, including the legal department. I had a good working relationship with every head of every department.

So I made an appointment with the university’s head counsel. I explained the situation to him including my boss’s boss making him promote me and my boss threatening me with my performance review. I told him that, although I was studying to be a DBA, I was really not qualified to be one without some hard work and if the university didn’t want me to take the position, I would absolutely turn it down. I also mentioned my boss’s nickname for his boss and the issue with the student worker and the big corp guy. Apparently, the student worker had already filed a harassment complaint so the head counsel knew about it.

He told me I had been promoted by someone (boss’s boss) who had every right to promote me and I should not worry about anything. He said if my boss gave me any more trouble that I should let him know.

A week later my boss and his #2 toady were fired. My boss ended up working at a small city college and is there to this day. I pity his employees.

I left the university about 2 years later and had a successful career as a DBA.

12. Boss gone AND more money?!

My manager wanted to prove I’m slacking off so he could write me up. So he watched CCTV footages then wrote, printed out and SIGNED a detailed 17 pages worth of Word document what did I do in the past two days. With timestamps (like, 07:59 arriving, 08:01 speaking with co-worker A and B, 08:07 sitting down to my desk, etc.). He told me that he’s not happy with my work ethics if I won’t improve my efficiency, I’m fired.

I took the papers and showed to his boss and told her that I’m not happy with my managers work ethics and his efficiency might be better if he wouldn’t watch 17 hours of CCTV footages to spy on an employee. She was terrified (it would’ve been a rock solid lawsuit for me – but I love my job) and we had to search for a new manager.

Also, my salary raised.

13. The ole email trick…

I left my last company due to a bully of a gm.

Many people were leaving over him causing problems, being sexist, racist, doing things people could easily sue them for claiming sexual harassment. List goes on. Everyone informed HR during their exit interviews, hell he even tried to make my exit interview not happen. Though they still weren’t doing anything. I had been at my new job for a couple months now and was STILL getting complaints from my old team almost daily.

So I made an email account and named Concerned company name Crew. Sent an email to EVERYONE who had an email account within the company explaining what he did/still did with events spanning from his start to the day prior.

They fired him within the week and my old crew thanked me.

14. Poachers getting punished…

One summer I volunteered to help a conservation society in East Africa. The aim of the project was to educate the local rural population about poaching and to get them to help us stop it from the ground up.

Anyway, I was staying with the lead ranger and his family and on numerous occasions he served us meat that I’m 100% sure was poached. He tried to tell me that it was pork, but it was dark and gamey with lots of small bones. I think that it was small antelope like dikdik or duiker.

When I returned to Nairobi I mentioned to my grandpa (his boss’s boss) that we’d eaten some odd meals. He investigated, and found out that my boss had a poacher friend who was selling him illegal meat. He was fired, I didn’t feel guilty. Poaching is awful.

15. And…. you’re gone!

I took a phone call on my cell when at my desk. Middle manager came up and screamed at me. Yelling about how I was not allowed to take calls for clients while at that office. I was a contractor and made it perfectly clear that I did work for multiple clients prior to doing work for this company.

The CTO’s office was 10 feet from mine. He came out and stood in his doorway listening to the rant. When the middle manager was done I just looked over at the CTO and said “it’s him or me and at the moment I don’t give a fuck which you pick.” CTO walked the middle manager out right then.

Funny thing: I didn’t hang up throughout the incident. And it was my wife on the other end. I was spending about 70 hours a week at their site digging their staff out of a hole they had dug themselves in.

16. The breaking point…

Complained for months about her breaking company policy (and thus state labor law, since the state considered a signed employee handbook to be a binding contract for both sides) — nothing. Tricked her into saying the things I’d been complaining about for months on a conference call with her boss and her boss’s boss, fired that day.

Context: My boss tried to tell me I couldn’t take breaks. The company policy handbook, which I had signed and thus became a binding contract by state law, laid out lunch and/or breaks based on length of shift scheduled for. When I pointed this out she switched to scheduling me by myself and then strolling by the store to check up on me occasionally, writing me up when she ‘caught me’ having closed the store in order to take breaks/eat lunch. Called her boss (regional director) and complained, got the write-ups removed, listened to her tell my boss to chill the fuck out and let me take my breaks, she still didn’t do it. Further (formal) complaints resulted in no changes. I knew there was a quarterly conference call coming up so I developed the habit of walking into her office and saying, ‘It’s time for my break,’ and making her say, every time, that I wasn’t allowed to go. She got in the habit of doing it kind of absent-mindedly in an increasingly aggressive tone. So then I did it again in the middle of the conference call and she blew a gasket, ranting at me about how many times she’d told me that I was not allowed to take breaks, under any circumstances, etc. The call, which she always put on speakerphone, went dead silent. It took her about 5 seconds to realize what she’d just done, and then before she could try to begin damage-control her boss politely cleared her throat and said, ‘Boss, I’ve told you before that that is incorrect.’ I grinned a big ol’ shit-eating grin and went back to work, and there was a temporary manager from another store there the next day.

Turns out she had had my formal, written complaints intercepted before they got to her boss, which I wasn’t aware was possible (apparently she had friends in high places), so I imagine that didn’t go well for her.

17. Gross!

He’d show up every day and tell us a tale of his sexual exploits. Whether true or not, none of us wanted to hear it.

If an attractive looking female comes in, he drops what he’s doing and stares at her, drooling liking a dog in a dog treat factory. After she leaves, he had to say a comment about her appearance.

After talking on the phone with a certain manager, he always comments on how nice her ass is.

He’d bully us employees and other managers. Called us bitches a lot despite us getting onto him for it.

My female coworker reported him. We all had a phone meeting with our district manager and HR. He was suspended until the investigation was over and they ruled to terminate him. Surprisingly HR worked for us that day.

18. Why can’t people be, yanoo… nice?

He was presenting a PowerPoint that I had put together to all the managers in the building. There was something he wanted to add at the last minute that he had never told me about, and when it wasn’t there, he verbally abused me for like 5 minutes straight. Yelling, name calling, telling me to prove to him that I had a college degree and wasn’t just making it up. I was a contractor so I was afraid to complain to HR because I assumed they’d just fire me, but a lot of other people in the room did.

After the meeting, I went into the share drive folder to find the presentation notes where the extra information was supposedly located. I watched the last changed time change from a day ago to the current time, then he immediately called and said it was right there in the notes file.

He was fired the next day for unprofessional behavior.

19. Everybody has encountered a “Linda”. Sorry in advance if your name is Linda…

My direct supervisor, Linda, was a cantankerous older woman with poor education and even worse people skills. About 3 months after I started, I got her so pissed off, just by doing my job, that she cursed me out, got up from her desk and quit.

I don’t even remember what I said that set her off. I probably asked her if she was done with her half of something that I needed in order to finish my half, and became exasperated when she wasn’t, because she’d been farting around all morning. It was a common occurrence.

After Linda walked out, our boss refused to hire her back when she begged (even though she’d been there something like 15 years), because “her attitude was so terrible and she’d become such a toxic, pathetic excuse for a human being.”

I got a pretty solid raise, most of Linda’s tasks (our boss was not unkind and took over some things herself, while giving me more practical things that I enjoyed doing), and even though my car was fine, she’d always have me drive her car to go make coffee runs, deposit checks, run errands, etc. It was a Toyota Solara convertible, and she’d tell me to take the top down and have fun.

I liked that job, I learned quite a bit, and if I hadn’t found something closer to home, for even more money, I probably would’ve been there quite a while.

20. Sometimes you just have to do it yourself…

I quit and his company collapsed without me. That kinda counts, right?

When I was 16, I had a stint as a small-time social media star on Twitter — not because I’m particularly interesting or anything, but for two reasons: a) I got on Twitter really early in 2007 when it was way easier to get followers and engagement due to the site being less noisy and more ‘stupid’ in terms of algorithms and b) I stood out from a lot of other minor Twitter stars because I didn’t let it get t my head; while a lot of them were egotistical and haughty, I followed everyone back, turned ‘haters’ into friends instead of retaliating, etc.

Through this fleeting fame, my former boss found me. He said he was setting up a regional media studio to help small- and medium-sized local businesses with their social media marketing, and he planned to eventually franchise the business into other cities. He hired me on the basis of my large social following (81,000 followers at the time). Obviously, having a large social following doesn’t automatically mean you know how to market businesses on social media, but I adapted and studiously researched how to do my job properly.

My boss didn’t come from a creative background or a marketing role — he came from a property background, and was just sort of winging it in finding an alternative source of income after the housing crash. Being as young as I was at the time, I didn’t really think about any of this stuff. The outcome was that I never received any training, had no real guidance in what I was doing, and was generally left to my own devices. Younger me thought it was great! I saw it as ‘freedom’, but looking back, I realize it was far too much freedom.

The side effects of this disparity between my social media skills and his inability to communicate creative ideas manifested themselves as people trying to cut past the business and come straight to me, to ask me directly as an individual whether I’d do work for them, rather than giving my boss the money. I was respectful (or naïve) enough to open up to my boss about this, and that’s when things started getting a little bit manipulative. He told me I could go my own way or remain part of a business that’d soon be growing across the country.

Fair enough, I thought. So I stayed, and one year in (I was 17/18 at this time) I realized that managing brands via social media had naturally morphed me into something of a graphic designer. A lot of my time was spent creating eye-catching visuals in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign etc. and so I suggested to my boss that we expand our media offering to include logo, graphic, and print design, and visual branding consultancy. Again, I received no training — I worked all day and studied by myself late into the night.

This pattern snowballed over the coming years. By the time I was 21, I was a social media manager, visual branding designer, copywriter, photographer, video editor, and web developer — all skills I nurtured independently with no input or guidance from my boss. The business was still operating in just one city, and my boss had started spending less and less time in the office. I still didn’t realize this wasn’t particularly normal, until clients who came to the office to meet me constantly asked where he was.

One day, a client went as far as to say: “You’re basically running the business at this point!“ It was a huge ‘glass shatter’ moment for me, and I suddenly realized that, yeah, although I wasn’t actually managing the business and its admin work etc., without me, there wouldn’t be a service or product to sell. What’s more, my wages hadn’t gone up, even though my ‘this is great, I have so much freedom!’ mindset had motivated me to continue working on stuff related to the business when I got home.

As I was nearing 22, the owner of the building where the business’ office was located asked me if I’d help him fix his computer (it was just running really slowly because he hadn’t managed his files very well). Not really thinking of it as work, I agreed, and headed into his office after work to help him out. As luck would have it, my boss walked in to hand over that month‘s rent, so he saw me there. He looked surprised, but didn’t comment — he just gave the dude the rent and left the building.

The next day, my boss wasted no time in probing me about what I was doing. He was speaking to me like a cop would speak to a suspect, asking me how long I’d been doing work for the landlord, what kind of work I was doing, why I hadn’t folded the work into the business, etc. I explained I was just fixing up his computer, and he leapt into a lecture about how we needed to keep all work inside the business, or else we would never be able to grow into other cities.

I turned 22. I’d been there for five years, my wages hadn’t gone up, I wasn’t allowed to do any work outside of the business, I hadn’t witnessed any of the growth I’d initially been promised, my boss was only in the office 25% of the time, and I saw him uploading Instagram Stories from him lunching, working out at the gym, walking his dogs, taking day trips etc. while I was at the office managing everything. A lot of the time he didn’t even warn me he’d not be in the office. It became the norm that if he didn’t turn up, I’d be running everything for the day.

Because I’d grown with the business from my youngest working age, I didn’t know any different, so all of this felt completely normal to me. And because I worked all day and all night and had no firm social life, I never got any outside perspective. Until one day, on a whim, I opened up to the landlord about it. He hadn’t even realized I was the one doing all the work — he figured it was split fairly 50/50. He said the amount of work I was producing was on the same level as an agency with three or four employees.

I started managing all of the branding, social media, and website maintenance for the landlord’s business, but didn’t broadcast that news to anyone. As I was nearing the age of 23, I met my now-fiancée, a perfectly feisty woman who, as soon as I told her about my situation, passionately advised I start my own media studio. This is where I entered the ‘long breakup’ period of my job, where I got increasingly depressed at work and physically felt my productivity slow to a near-halt.

My boss noticed, but never talked to me about it face-to-face. He started sending me irritated emails full of swear words demanding explanations for why I hadn’t delivered certain work by certain times and dates, while he was off sunning it up at the beach. It was like someone had pulled out his cork and let all the toxicity out in one torrent. My girlfriend hated him, and gently pushed me to the point where I felt like I was ready to confront him about the dead end we’d wound up in.

I asked a few of my friends about it, just to get a wider set of viewpoints on how I should go about it. They asked me things like, what does your contact say about you leaving the company and working with other businesses independently? Legal stuff, y’know. And that’s when I realized my lack of training over the past six years had also left me ignorant of the formalities of employment — I never had a contract! The real kicker was, I never had employee liability coverage either. My boss wasn’t even doing the admin stuff properly.

Obviously, that meant he also had no control over me when it came to contracts, so I literally just walked in (without my laptop — I’m now just realizing he never provided equipment either, yikes) and sat there waiting for him to arrive. Thankfully, it was one of the days he decided to turn up. He went and sat down in his chair, asked me where my laptop was and why I wasn’t working etc., and so I just straight-up told him that I was leaving the company to start my own media venture.

He laughed a patronizing laugh and simply said, “alright, good luck then.” Part of me felt like this was normal, because he was usually quite cold like that, but another part of me knew that there should have been some sort of emotion and deeper discussion in that moment. I wanted to say “so that’s it, then?” to try to flesh the talk out, but that really was it. He just turned to his computer and typing away as if I wasn‘t there. So I just turned around and left, went home, and that was it.

He did WhatsApp me a message later that day (all his caring and considerate communication came through digital means — perhaps he hired someone on a zero-hour contract to inject emotion into his texts?) asking if we could meet at the pub for a proper goodbye. And we did. It was a nice gesture, but it felt very awkward and forced, as if he’d spoken to someone about it and they’d coaxed him into doing it. He shook my hand, wished me good luck (much more genuinely this time), and we parted ways.

Three months later, I’d tripled my income as a freelancer. All of those clients who’d try to come to me directly over the years — it was like a floodgate had opened, and they all came rushing to me. I hadn’t told them I’d left, but obviously, they realized it themselves when they went to the office and I was never there. I felt bad about ‘stealing’ clients away from my former boss, but what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t just abandon the people I’d been working with just because of morals. That‘d be immoral, if anything.

I continued working with the landlord and even traveled with him a few times to build my solo filmmaking portfolio by documenting his brand’s work across the UK, including his talks at business seminars. We developed a very close working relationship, to the point where just my work for his company was earning me more than all the work I did for my former boss. He started sharing a few bits of gossip with me about how my old boss had begun paying rent later and later. I figure perhaps his cash flow had something to do with it, but the landlord also showed me an email my old boss had written in which he’d expressed his anger at the landlord for ‘colluding’ with me and pushing me to leave his company.

The further I distanced myself from the company, the more I realized how toxic he behaved towards everyone he came into contact with. I could never see it from the inside. Every time I checked the old company’s website, a new service had been removed, because it wasn’t something he could offer anyone anymore.

Back in November 2018, the landlord told me that he was kicking my old boss out of the office after he failed to pay rent for three months. A few weeks after that, the landlord proposed that we go into business together to create a separate media studio solely focused on the industry his business operates within. He said that we’d take the old company’s office once my former boss had moved out, and that I could also use that office for my own freelance venture, free of charge.

One year after leaving, I’ve taken 25% of my old boss’ clients, occupied his office, and quadrupled my income.

There’s a part of me that feels guilty about all of this — he’s a guy who didn’t quite know what to do after the housing market crashed and tried something out which didn’t go too well. But at the same time, I can’t feel too bad for someone who I believe took advantage of me for half a decade. If you treat someone with disrespect, you end up with very little. If you treat someone with respect, they give you a free office and offer to start a new business with you.

TL;DR: boss never did anything properly — no training, no contracts, no insurance, very little respect, not much guidance, empty promises about business growth, etc. Everything I learned independently resulted in me quadrupling my income and taking over his office within a year of leaving his company.

Damn! That last story was EPIC!

Good for him!

The post 21 People Explain How They Got Their Bosses Fired appeared first on UberFacts.

Baristas of Starbucks Share the Most WTF Questions They’ve Ever Been Asked

Starbucks has transcended coffee – the ubiquitous white cup is now a universally recognized icon.

With countless millions of customers served, it’s fair to say that the fine baristas at Starbucks have pretty much seen and heard it all. Read the following stories from Starbucks baristas below come to your own conclusions.

1. How could she?!?

Photo Credit: Whisper

2. Agreed. Close enough.

Photo Credit: Whisper

3. People need to get new hobbies…

Photo Credit: Whisper

4. Oh really?!?

Photo Credit: Whisper

5. Because they dumb!

Photo Credit: Whisper

6. Yes, that’s what it means…

Photo Credit: Whisper

7. Just a little tinkle, I’m assuming?

Photo Credit: Whisper

8. Oh, that’s kind of sweet!

Photo Credit: Whisper

9. Damn… forward much?

Photo Credit: Whisper

10. No, it’s orange flavored orangenade.

Photo Credit: Whisper

11. Oh damn mom!

Photo Credit: Whisper

12. This should be a thing.

Photo Credit: Whisper

13. Why would anybody ask this?

Photo Credit: Whisper

14. Wait… what?!?

Photo Credit: Whisper

15. Hey, it’s better than the top. Right?!?

Photo Credit: Whisper

16. Yeah, all of them.

Photo Credit: Whisper

17. You god damn dummy….

Photo Credit: Whisper

18. What an asshole!

Photo Credit: Whisper

19. Nope!

Photo Credit: Whisper

20. Yeah, fuck those people.

Photo Credit: Whisper

Seriously, what is the deal with Starbuck customers and not understand how lemonade works?

Inquiring minds want to know…

The post Baristas of Starbucks Share the Most WTF Questions They’ve Ever Been Asked appeared first on UberFacts.

14 Employees Who Should Have Definitely Gotten Fired But Miraculously Didn’t

Somebody on Reddit asked this question: “What is the biggest “oh fuck, I’m dead” thing you’ve done at work, but nobody ever found out?”

Thousands answered, and we combed through the best to share them with you.

1. “I was essentially trapped at work…”

Had a truck turn up 15 minutes before the end of the day and in my rush/pure fucking anger to just get him unloaded ASAP so I could go home I drove through the roller shutter doors as they were still opening and “caught” them with the top of the mast.

I got the guy unloaded and on his way and tried to lock up hoping to explain it all away the following day.

The door was that bent it wouldn’t lock, as it wouldn’t lock I couldn’t set the alarms, I was essentially trapped at work and now an hour late from leaving.

In a moment of pure desperation I lifted the doors again and drove into them from the other side bending them enough to lock them up, set the alarms and get home.

I’d hit them a little too hard so they were now bent inwards and the bosses assumed someone had reversed into them during the night – the estate we were on was a notorious cruising spot for the local boy racers and there was always tyre marks or bits of car scattered round the place so they got the blame

2. “…the only way to activate a multi-million dollar security technology system.”

Lost a key dongle that was worth $32k.

This was 15ish years ago in a different state and career. The dongle looked basically like a USB thumb drive was was the only way to activate a multi-million dollar security technology system for a hospital in a big city.

The thing is, I was 100% sure I never had it and that it was missing from the packaging from the manufacture. Everyone I worked with also was not sure they ever saw it too. I was distraught and sick to my stomach at the possibility I screwed up somehow on something so stupid and cost costly but ended up being convinced we never received it.

The owner of the company I worked for and our lawyers had to get involved with the vendor to make an agreement with them to send us a replacement for a relatively small fee. I’m not positive after all these years on this cost but think it was around $5k.

No one was happy but we needed it and it was done.

Fast forward to years later. I’m living in a different state, now married and working for a different company in a different field and I decide I want to use the backpack I used to use at the old job where the dongle was lost. I still had some stuff in it so I clean it out, turn it upside down and shake it and hear something rattling around.

In the bottom of the big compartment of the bag, it looks like a solid piece. I dig my fingers around it and was surprised to find it was a flap. I open the flap and HOLY SHIT its the mother f’ing missing $32k dongle!

I was shocked and for a second, felt so damn guilty. But then I just laughed as it was already taken care of and years in the past. Still feel like a shithead thinking about it all these years later just a little bit.

3. “I left Gwar, Meat Sandwich, as our only muzak…”

Gwar.

Our muzak hold crap system was out of whack, so since I’m IT, I was tasked to fix it. Stupid proprietary audio files, stupid codecs, stupid hold music.

To pass the time, I ripped a gwar cd that I recieved as a gag gift a million years ago to the proprietary format and amused myself by throwing “Meat Sandwich” on loop for testing.

Finally got everything working, called it a night and went home for the rest of the weekend.

Monday morning, around 11am, I get a call. “Hi, Coyote? I think our muzak system is still broken. People are complaining about the songs and the sound?”

What? WHAT? Call my work into question? I tested it MYSELF. I personally made sure the audio format was working with my OWN MUSIC and…

…and…

….and fuck.

I left Gwar, Meat Sandwich, as our only muzak for hold for our entire company.

I ran to the Datacenter, put everything back to default and the told them that it was “crossing channels” or some bullshit and everything was fine.

But we open at 6am. So for 5 glorious hours, Meat Sandwich was the music playing after the soft voiced woman told you to “Please Hold”.

4. “It was made out of diamonds or gold or something else fucked up.”

It was university.

They had this really expensive piece of equipment and I can’t remember exactly what it measured, or how it worked.

What I remember is this: you completed a “circuit” to power the thing, meaning you plugged a wire into 5volts or whatever came out of the wall, and another wire into the ground, and plugged both of them into the device (alligator clips baby).

What you got out of the wall was wayyyyyyyy too much current, so you had to put a resister between the wire from the wall and the device

The thing cost something ridiculous like 25k at the time. It was made out of diamonds or gold or something else fucked up.

Anyways, I got really pissed at my lab partner, just took over the experiment. And plugged the thing directly into the wall without a resister…

I basically fried the thing in a second.

I smelt burning and could see smoke come out of it immediately and knew exactly what I’d done.

As I literally thought “Oh fuck, I’m dead” and started realizing the gravity of my actions, this dude in a huge ass trench coat thing walks by my lab table, gets his coat caught in it and pulls the thing off the table. It lands on the ground and smashes into a million pieces.

Dude was walking with the guy who ran the labs, and that dude loses it on him.

I just sat in silence. I felt guilty but like I dodged the biggest bullet of my life.

I didn’t know definitively that I’d broke it, but I knew definitively that that dude had.

And I was too much of a coward to say anything.

5. “…my hot acid puke punched right through the bag and into my lap.”

It was the night before I was scheduled to have a tense meeting with my boss and a client. The meeting was supposed to be a sort of “peace talk” because of tension growing between my staff and the client who was an emotional and difficult person to work with. The night before my wife and I opened a bottle of wine with dinner and managed to finish it off before bed. This didn’t seem like too much at the time but the next morning I woke up sicker than I have ever been.

I still had this difficult meeting so I got up got dressed managed to choke down some Advil and a glass of water. The minute I get on the highway to work I feel my stomach twisting. There is nothing between where I am now and where my office is except highway with almost no shoulder.

Half way to work I feel that feeling in my throat, like a tightening, and my bowels are starting to make terrible noises. I realize I am going to throw up and look around my car for anything to throw up in. I spot McDonalds bag is on the floor so I grab it.

Hoping I don’t need to use it I speed up trying to get to my exit so I can pull over and ralph.

No dice.

I held the bag up to my mouth going 85 MPH and throw up red wine into the McDonalds bag which had the strength of tissue paper because my hot acid puke punched right through the bag and into my lap.

By some miracle I had extra business slacks in my car. I stopped at a gas station and changed in the bathroom. I looked into the mirror and a haggard sallow man with flop sweat and sunken eyes stared back at me. Even with the wardrobe change I smelled faintly of booze and vomit. I went to the meeting and my boss noticed something was up. He rescheduled with the client telling me “I don’t think you’re up to it this morning”.

I for sure thought he was going to fire me for being a huge drunk but nothing happened.

I don’t drink wine anymore.

6. “Went home. Ate pizza. Couple hours go by.”

I was to supposed to meet a client outside of work to discuss a business opportunity.

Got permission to leave work early to go to an arranged meeting with the customer. I went on auto-pilot as soon as I started driving from work. Forgot about the meeting. Picked up a pizza. Went home. Ate pizza. Couple hours go by.

OH SHIT!

I didn’t have a phone number for the customer, so I never called or anything, just no-call no-showed on the customer.

Customer never said anything. Manager never asked about it.

7. “My life flashes before my eyes.”

Okay so I’m running a summer camp and half way through the day I’m comparing our bus attendance to the group attendance and I notice there is a little girl who was marked as being on the bus but not in her group. I go and check the group, no sign of her.

Other groups, nope.

No one has seen this six year old girl and we are out in bumble fuck nowhere and I am losing my shit. I have lost a child. We’re gonna get so fired and gonna need to call the cops and they’re gonna have to search the woods.

My life flashes before my eyes.

After fifteen minutes of oh my god my life is over my coworker pulls up with the news that she spoke to the girls mom and she did not come to camp that day at all, the bus attendance was an error. I was five minutes from calling my boss and instead I collapsed in the dirt with relief and tried not to cry.

Holy fuck.

8. “….we only have one kid.”

Summer martial arts camp, probably 10+ years ago. Several times a day, the entire camp would be called to line up on the gymnasium floor. Roughly 50-75 kids, probably in rows of 8, spaces with about 5 feet between each kid, all nice and orderly.

For the most part, everybody knew exactly where and which spot to line up on. It was pretty meticulous laid out, and we would spend 20 or 30 minutes on the very first day, making sure each and every person knew specifically which spot to line up on.

One day, lineup is called for lunch or something. Whistle blows, mob of kids come crashing from all around. Kids take their spots, settle in, counselors are talking, telling them what’s for lunch, somebody is probably walking through the rows of kids with a giant bottle of hand sanitizer spritzing each pair of outstretched hands. Suddenly somebody noticed an empty spot. They turned to the next kid over who was quite young (probably 7 ish) and asked who stands there. “Oh, that’s my brother”. “Well where is he??” “I dunno..”.

So they proceed to tear the whole place apart.

Swimming pool???!? Check. Bathrooms? Check. Girls bunk? Check. Kitchen? Check. Showers? Check.

You name it, they searched there, twice. Finally they have to call the parents and tell them that they LOST one of their kids.

How do the parents respond?

“….we only have one kid.”

Oh yeah, kid forgot to mention that his brother was IMAGINARY.

9. “…20 minutes later walking in the back to ankle deep water.”

I used to work for a big box pet store taking care of the animals that lived in the store. There was a rotation of the animals getting their accessories changed out and cleaned (i.e. water bottles, food bowls, plastic huts) every day. So each day the morning person cleaned that day’s habitats and the closer did the “dishes” in the sink and set them to dry and be put back in rotation for use.

It was sometimes difficult to complete any of these tasks while also dealing with customers. The sink we did dishes in was very deep and company policy stated that the dishes had to soak in a cleaning solution for a certain amount of time so it took a long time to fill up the sink with the solution to soak everything.

It was common to turn the water on to fill up the sink and go see if anyone needed help in the store while you waited.

Not long after I started working there I was performing this task and got pulled into a long conversation with a customer. Normally I’d duck in the back and turn off the faucet if I thought the conversation would take a while, but this night I just completely forgot the sink was on. Cue like 20 minutes later walking in the back to ankle deep water. The sink had overflowed and was filling the back space. The door had a rubber stopper at the bottom keeping it from going into the store

I took a squeegee thing and started herding the water into a drain on the floor on the back side of the fish wall but it took a long time. I was so frantic and still had to pay attention to customers out on the floor. Luckily no one else ever went into the back unless you worked in that department and I was working alone. So I managed to herd most of the water into the fish drain and the rest dried over night before the opener came in. No one ever knew I flooded the back space.

Few months later I realized flooding was a common occurrence and my manager flooded it at least once a year.

10. “We call it the doom button…”

I auto-archived 2500 records from our database with one button push. This removed them from active status and cancelled any associated reservations and services.

I had to click into each record and reinstate it. Took me 6 hours.

I admitted my folly at the next team meeting to ensure no one else had to go through the sheer butt puckering terror I did when those records disappeared. We call it the doom button now. Why there is a doom button I have no idea.

11. “…forklift tine and punched it all the way through her tailgate!!!”

When I was 18 I worked for Menards (like Home Depot). It was a small store with an outside yard that you couldn’t drive into so we would pick what you wanted with a forklift and load the customers out in the parking lot.

So this lady came in to pick up a bunch of special order bricks. I loaded two pallets of bricks into the back of her very nice new truck, she signed the paperwork and the transaction was done…. Until I sat in the forklift filling out my part of the paperwork and she backed into a forklift tine and punched it all the way through her tailgate!!!

I was 100% in the wrong as anyone who has ever driven a forklift knows that unless you are actively using the lift, you keep the tines on the ground if you’re parked, and a couple inches above while driving.

I had seen a guy get fired once for driving over a piece of cardboard instead of stopping to pick it up, so I was beyond screwed… but she just put it in drive and took off. She didn’t even look back at me. I expected that she was going to pull up to the front of the store to report it, but she just left. As far as I know she never reported it, and no one ever knew it happened.

That was 21 years ago and I think about that incident pretty often.

12. “…the captain made a wrong turn onto a narrow taxiway…”

When I was a brand new airline pilot we landed at an airport that required a long taxi back to the terminal. During the taxi the captain made a wrong turn onto a narrow taxiway that led to a small private hangar. As soon as he made the turn we knew it was the wrong taxiway, but it was very narrow with trees on both sides so there was no way to turn around. I had no idea how we were going to deal with this.

He thought for a minute, then said, “McGonogle, can you see the tower from here?”

I looked. “Nope.”

“Good. Then they can’t see us.”

With that, he reversed both engines and slowly backed onto the main taxiway. I guess the passengers thought it was normal because no one asked any questions and we never heard anything about it.

13. “…paperclip flew right over the small wall and hit a customer right in the head…”

when I was about 17 I used to internship at a bank through a school program. It was a small business bank so there wasn’t any glass like you see at big banks. The set up was 4 desks lined up next to each other with small walls separating them almost cubicle style but shorter. My desk was all the way at the end next to the wall.

Anyways, so I’m sitting at my desk bored one day with nothing to do so I grab a paperclip and start flicking it paper football style at the wall separating my desk and the one next to it. Ever ytime it bounced back I would flick it again.

Well one time I flicked it a little too hard and the paperclip flew right over the small wall and hit a customer right in the head that was waiting to be attended.

My heart sank and so did my head down to the desk as I tried to go unnoticed in hopes that they wouldnt know who did it. Looking back it was probably obvious that the 16 y/o boy was the one flicking paperclips and not the 40+ old ladies next to him.

Luckily I don’t think the customer knew what hit her and I was never blamed for it.

14. “I never had to fess up to my boss…

Working at a high end tour company, I backed a bus hitch into a guest’s BMW. Broke one of their tail lamps.

I picked up all the plastic remnants from the ground and taped a note to their window to find me when they returned from their tour to discuss the damage and go speak to the owner with me about insurance, etc.

I’d been breaking down my trip to make way for the next bus arriving, so I hadn’t had a chance to go tell my boss before they returned. The guest came and found me, laughing. Said someone had hit it a few weeks prior and it was already being processed through the insurance of the other person who had hit him, and not to worry about it.

He hadn’t realized that I’d done additional damage because it was the same tail light, nothing else was damaged and I’d picked up all the broken pieces from the ground, so it didn’t look that bad compared to what damage had already existed.

I never had to fess up to my boss about the incident and learned to never attempt to park the bus near the fancy cars again.

Wow!

The post 14 Employees Who Should Have Definitely Gotten Fired But Miraculously Didn’t appeared first on UberFacts.