Where did these managers find these weirdos in the first place? The restaurant must have been extra awkward that day, as employees were fired for some of the weirdest, unforeseen reasons that thoroughly disturbed the upper management. Hopefully whoever replaced these people was a little bit more normal? Content has been edited for clarity.
Starbucks Shenanigans
“My coworker at a coffee shop only worked there for two days. The location was a certain green and white cup establishment in Oklahoma. Lots of illegal substances can be found around the area. Not Tiger King-levels of bad, though. She may have been stoned out of her mind, there’s no telling with the area. The school systems have really failed the less-than-genius population.
She wore cookie monster pajama pants while we had a very strict ‘black or khaki pants, no jeans, no leggings’ policy at the time. She told a customer that she didn’t feel like making the requested drink, and that the customer should go elsewhere. We pulled her aside and told her how not okay that was. Even if we are at peak times and busy as heck, we make every drink correctly to the customer’s satisfaction. This happened on the first day while she was on training.
She couldn’t figure out the concept of milk. This still baffles me to this day. Like I was trying to show her how to steam milk properly, but she was off in la la land. When she snapped back into the conversation, she asked, ‘What are we doing again?’ followed by me reminding her and she quite literally asked what was gallon jug that I poured into the metal pitcher. I told her it was milk, and she just looked at me, her eyes looked so confused.”
Most Immature 40-Year-Old Ever
“I was 17, and my brother was 20. Our parents left us in charge of the pizza place that we ran in Minocqua, Wisconsin. I was a senior in high school and my bro ran things behind the scenes. I was working about 45 hours a week and getting paid for 20 hours a week to help save the business. I was the assistant manager. We had delivery and carryout only. So this dude we hired was around 40-something, which is about the age I am now. He thought he knew better than us about everything. He would repeatedly try to check the books by walking back to the office, which was off limits to everyone but us. The reason why this dude got fired you ask?
He went on a delivery to about four peoples houses. He was taking way too long, like an hour to get back. We then get phone calls. It’s the customers. All of them one after another. Instead of making the deliveries, he took the pizzas and our cash and went home, thinking he was giving us the big finger. Mind you, my brother was in National Honors Society and I was in gifted classes. We weren’t stupid, we were just young.
Well, we called his house because no one had cell phones yet. He answered, ‘Yeah?’
My brother asked him if he was okay. He said, ‘I’m good. How about you?’
My brother’s face turned red, but he calmly asked why this guy didn’t deliver the pizzas. ‘Eh, didn’t feel like it.’
‘Oh okay, I understand. Well you’re fired, and we have called the cops already, and they should be there soon, as you stole our customer’s pizzas and we have to make new ones. Have a good life buddy.’
Click.”
Her Master Plan Revealed!
“When I was working at Burger King, our restaurant manager was away on maternity leave, so we had someone from another store come in over that time to fill the role. He ended up hiring someone who had worked there 5-6 years previously, and the few staff that had known her before she’d left had hated her, but they had no idea why she left. She even passed all the checks from the head office before she was hired.
The restaurant manager comes back about a month after she’s been hired, takes one look at her, and RAGES. Like my restaurant manager is yelling at this girl, she’s yelling at the manager that hired her, as well as yelling at all the crew that had known her when she was here last. Obviously none of us knew what was going on, but it turns out this girl hadn’t left. She’d been fired, and management at the time hadn’t told anyone that, just that she’d quit.
This girl had scammed Burger King by pretending to be pregnant. She used fake ultrasounds, plans, a staged baby shower, the whole nine yards. Then took paid maternity leave so she could go work somewhere else, because it was seasonal work with better pay, with the idea of having a job for the off-season to come back to. I have no idea how she got through the head office checks, but she was fired that day.”
Literally No Boundaries
“This is a long one, but oh boy, I’ll never forget it. I was 16 years old and a supervisor at a popular fast food and ice cream joint. My Boss was VERY fond of having younger people working for him, because we were less likely to report him for the stupid things that he did. I was responsible for training a new hire, who was a 40-year-old woman. She did all of this in just four hours.
I’d like to add that ALL of this was COMPLETELY unsolicited. There was no conversation leading up to any of this that was in any way relevant, and she would just randomly do these things. Most of it happened when I was just trying to eat in peace on my break, or in the middle of trying to show her how to do something. She was given a few more chances after this, but we did end up having to tell her she couldn’t work for us.
She grabbed my fries out of the container and ate them right in front of me while I was on break eating. She thought this was hilarious and quirky. She told me explicit personal details about her general life and medical conditions (none of them were serious or relevant to the job in any way). She even pulled out prescription pill bottles to show me and brag about them.
She showed me the scar from a surgery she had during childhood. This involved her almost pulling her pants completely down because the scar wasn’t easily accessible. This was in the back employee area, where we had a large work station and kept our freezers. It definitely was not a private area. She immediately told me after she had put her uniform on that she promises to, ‘Only yell at me if I do something wrong.’
I was the one supervising and training her.”
Special Secret Ingredient
“I know this guy a friend used to work with that got fired from a fast food joint for spitting in two hamburgers that were going to be served to his ex-wife and her new husband.
So the story goes, the guy’s ex-wife, along with her new husband, walked in and ordered a burger. The ex-wife happened to see her former husband making the hamburgers in the back of the restaurant. The guy noticed his ex-wife was there, and he looked very jealous when her husband emerged too. They were smiling at each other, which apparently made the guy very angry. He was apparently abusive to his ex-wife. They got their order a few minutes later, and they left the restaurant.
The husband however, then had a gut feeling that the guy had messed with the burgers, so he opened the burgers to check. Indeed, the guy had spat in the burgers. He marched back into the restaurant and demanded to see the manager, and pointed the finger at the guy saying, ‘He did it.’
The manager immediately fired the guy on the spot. I thought that too when I heard the story. My presumption would be that the ex-wife only saw her ex-husband in the back of the restaurant after she’d placed her order. She had also not heard from him for a few years, as she cut ties with him once the divorce was finalized. What a way to reintroduce yourself!”
What Went Through His Mind?
“I had a guy at a restaurant who has been described by customers as discount Jonny Depp. He showed up to work at 9 to open and worked until 1. He took his lunch break and never returned. 3:30 rolls around and he hasn’t returned. I get concerned and give him a call. After three tries, I step outside and see his car parked in the parking lot. I walk up, and he’s nowhere to be seen.
That’s when I get a call from the restaurant. He’s back and he’s plastered. At 3:45 p.m. He apparently had gone to the bar next door and drank 8 shots, then he returned to work. He proceeded to deliver food to a table, hit on the woman at the table in front of her husband, and when asked by the husband to get lost, he leaned in and shushed him.
I grabbed him by the shoulders and walked him into the dish room, which wasn’t to far from the table. I then left him with our two dishwashers and returned to the table to apologize. After clearing everything up, I go into the dish room to find him missing again. After a few minutes of searching, I find him in the storage shed just outside the restaurant, no clothing on, warming himself around a small fire.”
Running A Side Scam
“In the early 2000’s, I managed a coffee shop that required the customers’ names to be put on the cup. One guy looked like he was doing it, but upon closer inspection on some cups, he was writing an IP address. Turns out he was running an illegal sports book out of the shop. He did quit before I had to technically fire him, because he found out I knew.
It took me a woefully long time to clue into what he was doing. The coffee shop is a part of a worldwide chain that has many stores in the Southern California area. The particular shop that I managed was in one of the higher end beach cities. This employee was very into sports, but he would always talk about sports in more betting terms. Streaks, injuries, over/under, etc. I also found out that he had some shady connections with some people whose professions were not legal. He was outgoing, but always seemed to be a little different with certain richer and younger customers.
I started to think that he must be betting or working for a sports book. It made sense that he could be a middle man between the underworld connections and the young rich professionals. This was around 2000, and it was not easy to make bets on events unless you went to Nevada. My guess was the IP address was a set up to either get to a website or maybe a way to direct dial into the computer similar to the old bulletin boards in the mid 90s.
I knew everything I had was not entirely actionable to fire him but I ‘accidentally’ let it slip that I knew what he was doing to his best friend that worked with us. The next day he asked me if he could resign. I accepted.”
Stuck His Foot In His Mouth
“It wasn’t me that fired him, but my Dad. My parents owned a café and had just hired a new employee on his first training shift. My mom had introduced herself as the boss (although my dad owns the business, my mom is just as much one of the bosses). My mom is British and my dad is Spanish. My dad was working in the back kitchen (he was the main chef), and my mom was teaching the guy the table numbers and introducing staff. When she explained that some of the kitchen staff didn’t have really strong English skills, the bloke went off on one saying, ‘Well I am glad you are finally given the British a chance, foreigners that come to Britain need to speak English, or they should be deported immediately!’
My dad steps in explains that he moved to this country without knowing a word of English and built his business up from nothing, and now he speaks five languages (much more than this British guy that could only speak English). My dad explains how everyone should be given a chance, but that this British guy had blown his one chance to work at my dad’s establishment. He fired him on the spot and banned him from coming back. This bloke was replaced by an Italian lady that my dad speaks to on occasion in Italian, just to brush up his language skills. He has been living in England for 46 years now.”
Don’t Go To This Target
“I was a witness to the madness. Years ago, I was working in the café’ part of a local Target. We had such a difficult time keeping employees. Out of desperation, our section leader hired this dude to be a shift manager. I’ll call him Joe, for the sake of the story. Although other shift managers out in the actual store got radios and headsets, we (because we were slinging food) did not. Joe insisted he get one and decided to throw a tantrum because the store manager was like, ‘You don’t need one.’
I was the subject of his rage one Monday, after I’d left a note for the shift manager because Joe had decided not only was he NOT going to show up for his shift, but he wasn’t going to call in, either.
Joe was severely reprimanded after a pharmacy technician rejected his advances, so he decided the logical course of action was to follow her out to her car and then bounce her bumper up and down (after she’d gotten in), to prove how much he liked her.
The final straw was when a customer filed a complaint of harassment. There was a female construction worker who would come in regularly to pick up breakfast before she went to work. Joe was like, ‘Hey… you’re cute!’ but she was all, ‘Hey… I’m married!’
Joe persisted though. One morning when this female construction worker came in, he tried to grab her by the arm so he could pull her in for a kiss. She slapped him and took off. Her husband came in later that afternoon to speak to the manager because he couldn’t believe what she had experienced.
Joe was fired shortly afterwards because our shift manager was like, ‘I cannot take this anymore.’
This was around the same time I quit. Later on, I also found out later that another shift manager was taken out in handcuffs for being an illegal immigrant AND having stolen somebody’s social security number so he could get a job.”
Kill The Whole Party
“I was a bartender/bar manager. This guy came in one night and said he was an aspiring DJ and asked if we would consider hiring him to come in just on Sunday nights to DJ for us. He said we wouldn’t have to pay him at first, he would just take tips and we could renegotiate after he helped to build up our Sunday night crowd. He lasted less than three months. He drove away so much business and I got SO many complaints. He played the same songs every week and when people made requests (for commonly known songs), he had no idea who they (the musicians) were.
I had to fire someone who was working for free. He was a nice guy, which is the only reason he lasted as long as he did. He was mid-20s. We had some regulars who were in their 40s and his idea to please them was to start his set with ‘Rockin’ Robin’ again and again for many weeks in a row. The first Sunday after he was gone, one of the regulars played it on the jukebox, and there was quite a bit of laughter/cheering. He was pretty unpopular. Poor guy.”
Got Some Tricks Up His Sleeve
“I was running a kitchen for a friend of mine at this barbecue joint. We hired this one kid who, no matter what approach I tried, just couldn’t listen. I’m really not an angry chef, and I think I eventually had to yell at this dude more than every other time I have yelled in my whole career. We put him on notice and cut his shifts. After a week or so of me working very close and very patiently with him, he actually started to improve. Then, one night, he just completely backslid on a night I was closing alone with him. He just couldn’t stay focused and couldn’t take any hints that I didn’t want to talk or be friends, and I just wanted to work.
After the shift was over, I went to the bar and sat all the way on the opposite side of where the staff normally would. This dude comes up and start furiously hitting on the girls I’m sitting nearby. They tell him politely they aren’t interested, so he comes over to me (I’m literally in a corner sitting on my phone, not talking to anyone)
‘Yo bro, you want anything?’
‘No, I’m good.’
‘You sure? I got oxys, roxxies, molly, white, and some heady bud!’
My jaw literally drops open, and all I can say is, ‘DUDE, I’m your boss, go home!’
Next day I talked to the owner and we let him go.”
Vicious Cook Incoming!
“Maybe about 18 years ago, I was running a kitchen. I was promoted pretty quickly, because the previous sous chef kept coming to work wasted, nothing like a ‘last night I had a little too much fun’ feeling, more like, ‘I smell like urine because I got so wasted I peed myself In my uniform and woke up and came to work in these urine pants,’ kind of feeling. He was let go and I got promoted.
There was this guy (I’ll call him A) that started about a week before me. He was beyond angry that I was promoted over him. I had a lot of experience working in kitchens and this was A’s 1st job outside of working in a nursing home and a kids school cafeteria. So he would pull passive aggressive stuff with me often. He would place items I used daily on tops of shelves that I couldn’t reach. Then, I’d force him to relocate them to where they go and told him he is not allowed to rearrange the kitchen on a whim. He mumbled something about, ‘having a woman chef’, whatever dude, get over it. Then, he started taking smoke breaks during our dinner rushes, who does that?! Especially without at least seeing with your teammates if it’s cool or should he wait, he’d just disappear.
He also had this superiority issue where he truly thought he was going to be some famous chef one day. I take food safety very seriously. The first thing I saw that upset me, but didn’t warrant being fired, was him tossing raw chicken into a pot of boiling water, and then throwing them on the grill for a moment to leave grill marks. These were NOT grilled chicken, they were boiled then grilled and I tossed them before he served them and told him to never do that again. He did it again about a week later, so I demoted him to salads and prep for two weeks, hoping he’d learn his lesson.
Then, one morning I watched him break down ten raw chickens perfectly. I was impressed, and I was starting to get a soft spot for him. I figured he was trying to prove that he was worthy of the position that he wanted. But what happened next completely shocked me.
He cleaned a massive drum of lettuce (basically a massive salad spinner). He then promptly dumped the entire cleaned lettuce onto the table that he just broke down those raw chickens on. The table wasn’t even cleaned. Salmonella was imminent. I fired him on the spot. He cussed me out, even lunged at me before the dishwasher grabbed him. I told him to get out, and I would have someone collect his stuff for him to get outside business hours. As he was leaving out the door, I mentioned, ‘You know, Red Lobster is hiring across the street.’
That was exactly what he has condescendingly told another employee recently. I bet he realized what a terrible thing that was to say.”
“I Fired Three Managers In Two Weeks”
“I fired three managers in two weeks for the most bizarre reasons: adult films, assault, and theft.
The first one was a 45-year-old guy with a wife and two kids. A server comes to me one day and tells me that this manager Dave (I was above him as the general manager) handed her the keys to his car and told her to search his glove box. She goes to his car, and in the glove box are several professional explicit photos of a male coworker, Jack, hooking up with his boyfriend. An investigation takes place and we finally determine that Jack asked the manager Dave to take the photos. Dave took the photos and some video in his own home, while his wife and kids were gone. Fired.
The second one was only a week later. I get a call one day that Dwight should not be listed as our bar manager, because he didn’t pass a background check. AN investigation ensues, and we find out that Dwight had pleaded guilty recently to two charges of assault. We didn’t catch it when we hired him, because the charges were still pending at the time. We fired him for lying on his application, because there was a section about any pending felonies at the time of hire.
The third incident occurred two weeks later, the day after Christmas. This restaurant was closed on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. But company policy was that someone had to go into the store, make sure it was secure, count the safe, send an email to the CEO, and change the video tape for security cameras. I would be driving by the store anyway on Christmas Eve, so I stopped in. I open the safe and it’s empty. The bar drawers are empty and the register is empty. The only thing left was a few rolls of quarters.
I call my boss, pull the video tape, and head to my in-law’s house. My wife’s whole family is excited to watch this video with me to see what is going on. It turns out the closing manager went into the restaurant on Christmas Eve three times to get money from the safe, as well as a few drinks from the bar. At one point, he spins around, looks right at the camera, and left. Then he returned and looked through the safe one more time for money. He showed up on the 26th like nothing had happened. I started asking him about it, and he gave me some nonsense about how his buddy’s car broke down and he needed money for a tow. A tow? $1800 for a tow?!
I told him he had thirty minutes to get back with all the money, or we were calling the police. This dude and his wife only had one car at the time, and I made him wait outside for her to pick him up. He got the money on time though, not sure how. We called the cops anyway. Fired.”