Social media is supposed to be fun and games, but that’s hardly ever the case. Especially when it comes to employment. The bottom line jobs and social media don’t mix and you can take these folks’ stories as proof. Check out how these workers got fired for something they posted online.
Incriminated By Instagram
“I once had to fire five employees at a KFC I managed on the same day because of a social media post. One of my employees, we’ll call him Richard, suspected that another employee, Joey had stolen his new shoes from the breakroom.
When I asked him how he knew this he hesitated and said that Joey had posted a picture of him wearing the same shoes on Instagram the day that his shoes went missing. Richard was very upset but didn’t know how to confront Joey about it and was afraid to start workplace drama.
I asked Richard to get me a copy of the photo, as I didn’t want to speak to Joey without proof. He told me he didn’t have an Instagram, so he wouldn’t be able to show me the picture, but he knew Joey’s username. He shared the username with me and I checked it out. Sure enough, there he was wearing the exact shoes Richard had described, dated the same day they went missing.
Now, this obviously isn’t enough to be sure that he took them, but it was enough that I felt comfortable asking about it in an effort to get the shoes back. However, as I scrolled down a little another photo caught my eye – it was Joey and four more of my employees, looking completely WASTED in the employee break room, with the bottle of Jack.
They’re obviously not allowed to drink on company property. The craziest part was – Richard was in the picture drinking with them! This poor sap was trying to get his shoes back so he directed me toward the Instagram page… not knowing – since he didn’t have one – that there was something incriminating him on there, too! Joey apparently hadn’t told anyone that he had posted the photo.
They were all working that night, so we had to pull them in one directly after the other, for several hours straight, to fire them each. They all admitted to doing it and it was a huge pain losing all that staff on the same day. The moral is – don’t do stupid stuff and post it on the Internet.”
Actions Have Consequences, Buddy!
“Former Chipotle manager. As many of you know, Chipotle gives away free food on Halloween. So it’s a mandatory weekend for everyone to work. Well, one of our employees called off that Thursday saying he had swine flu… right.
Of course, he posted pics of his weekend parting on his Facebook. He was also friends with our kitchen manager, general manager, and district manager.
Per company policy (and common sense) you can’t return to work from a seriously contagious illness without a doctor’s note. So he shows back up on Wednesday acting all fine and saying the doc cleared him. Oh, but his mom threw his release note away. Too bad buddy, we need that note or you can’t work. Since we didn’t know when he would have it, we only gave him one day on the schedule anyway.
So then HIS MOMMY calls me and asks why he can’t work. I ask her, if she went to a restaurant and found out a cook hadn’t proven he was cleared from having swine flu, would she eat there? She saw my point. But it’s not his fault she threw away the note! They were REMODELING! I asked, why can’t the doc write a new one? Well, he went on vacation! …couldn’t the receptionist or a P.A. get them something? She huffed and hung up on me.
The next day he puts on Facebook ‘Dear Chipotle and managers: instead of cutting hours on someone, why not grow the balls to fire them outright? Screw off.’
Pretty easy to let him go after that.”
No Fun And Games At GameStop
“Worked at GameStop until 2010. The store was in a mall and parents would always leave their kids in the store and go do their shopping. Sometimes the children would cry, sometimes they’d pee themselves and even had one #2. Parents would get mad at us for not bringing them to the bathroom or start screaming at their kids for not just playing games for a few hours without causing any problems. I tweeted about how the store wasn’t there to babysit children and never really thought about that tweet again.. until –
A few months later, the same thing. The parent drops the kid off in-store and leaves. 20 minutes later, an older-looking guy is on his flip phone outside the store, aiming it at the store. He’s creeping me out but I continue offering pointless warranties to customers while waiting for my next break and then, I noticed him walk near the entrance of the store and ask that kid where his parents are. This seemed really fishy and the guy looked beyond suspicious, I thought he could be a creeper and I was right. He gets the kid to go with him, I call up mall security so they could check it out and they caught him before he left the mall.
He was arrested, and the kid was crying, asking for his mom. Who mall security could not reach because as it turns out, she went to some stores outside of the mall area and didn’t actually come back for another two hours, at which point she threatened to sue me, GameStop, the mall, etc. The security guard lady told her that child services were called, and they all walked away (that was the last time I saw them).
A few days later, District Manager (DM) shows up in the store and I was fired on the spot because that lady made a complaint, DM found my Twitter and informed me that my approach to yesterday’s dilemma and my tweet about how Gamestop isn’t a babysitting service has made them believe that I don’t have the ‘GameStop spirit’.
Both the manager and district manager told me I could use them as a reference on my resume though, which was great until they both lost their jobs a few weeks later.”
Scarves Get You Fired!
“OH BOY SCARF TUESDAY STORY TIME!
So here’s a funny and quite immature story. I’ll keep it short and sweet.
I worked for a place that has a gift shop. Inside this gift shop were the ugliest, unwearable scarves on the face of the planet. I was younger and didn’t really care about the company or any possible consequences.
I started a movement called ‘Scarf Tuesday’. Basically, a few of us (on the clock) would meet up at 9 every Tuesday and wear a scarf for a photo on Facebook. These photos started getting likes and people loved them, so we kept going.
A few months later, I get pulled into my boss’s office. On the wall, I kid you not, are at least twenty of the scarf Tuesday pictures WITH THE FACES BLURRED OUT. My boss asks me, to this day, the funniest question I’ve ever been asked:
‘What do you see here?’
I smiled and told him it looked like employees wearing scarves.
He said he found it ‘hilarious’ but it was unacceptable and he was disappointed. Apparently, somebody watching the cameras wasn’t happy and watched us for weeks piling evidence. EVERYBODY (fifteen people at least) had similar meetings in the next few days.
I didn’t get canned right away because we stopped doing Scarf Tuesday, but the retaliation was awful and eventually, I was blamed for just about everything that went wrong and got fired.
Looking back at it, it was foolish. I fell into a deep depression for a few months because of being unemployed. It helped me grow into a man though and now I have a full-time managerial job making twice as much. I’ll never regret it because it brought me on a path that led to a better life.”
Online Cat Fanatics Got Her Fired
Animal Services Officer here.
A post had gone viral about somebody who bragged on Facebook about beating her cat when it scratched her. Turned out it was in our jurisdiction, and thanks to the power of fanatical animal rights activists, we were given the abuser’s full name, address, telephone number, and even place of work.
So because she admitted to being scratched by the cat, we had the grounds to seize it so it could undergo a ten-day quarantine period. Meanwhile, she’s being issued death threats galore by the aforementioned fanatical animal rights activists. In fact, they’re going so far as to threaten her family members too, who were otherwise totally uninvolved in the case.
So what do I do once the cat’s in our custody? I snap a picture of it while it’s in its kennel back in the restricted quarantine area of the shelter, and I reply to one of the viral Facebook posts demanding action against the cat’s owner with the picture, stating ‘we have her now,’ to ensure the fanatics that she’s safe.
Well, that absolutely and somehow unexpectedly blew up all over the place and within the hour, a screenshot of my comment had gone viral too. So I took it down and hoped that would be that.
I had the next day off, but I got a phone call from a cop local to the city I worked in. ‘Hi, is this <my name>?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you use the name <my FB pseudonym> on Facebook?’
‘Yes.’
Turns out the viral screenshot had made its way back to the cat’s owner, and now she’s threatening to sue me for slander and sue the shelter/city for letting the picture from a restricted area leak.
No lawsuits ended up being filed, but I called the shelter and gave them the heads up as to what happened. Two days later I was fired.
I ended up suspending that FB account, which I had had since 2004, and started a new one. I was getting too many requests and notifications from fanatics.
As a result of all that, I spent the last four months unemployed and without the option of earning unemployment money due to the circumstances which led to my being fired. I’m employed at another shelter now, though, closer to home. They know about what happened at the other place. My former supervisor even wrote me a letter of recommendation which helped me nab this job.
Fired For Trying To Inform The Community
“I got fired from an internship for posting on Reddit before. It was a very small environmental engineering consulting firm. We were doing work on a site that had lead and arsenic contamination on it. The site was very dusty, and if it didn’t rain for a few days the dust would often kick up and blow onto the street next to the site, which happened to be the main road in this semi-smallish town.
Someone mentioned on Reddit, in a totally unrelated way, that they were from this town. I made a mention of the contamination and told the dude that if he ever saw dust coming off the site that he should contact the engineers which were housed above one of the local bars.
Apparently, this guy didn’t really want the site to be redeveloped at all because of the already high congestion in the surrounding roads, and he called and complained and mentioned my post on Reddit.
The company was so small it was obvious it was me who posted it, and I fessed up about what I had said and immediately deleted the post. Even though I didn’t do anything illegal, or even remotely immoral, I was fired because I was seen as a liability.
Screw that. People deserve to know if the dust they’re breathing in could give them cancer. I moved onto a different field (marine biology) and haven’t even remotely looked back.”
Fired For Refusing To Server Alcohol To A Minor?!
I was working as a bartender and server for a place. The assistant manager was a petty tyrant and treated the staff like trash. I had made several complaints about him to the general manager and the owner with some of the other staff, but they refused to do anything about it. So I was done with this place and was currently looking for a new job when one day I was bartending and a very young-looking girl came. She hands me her out-of-state ID, and I can tell that it is fake.
I politely tell her that I can’t serve her alcohol, and explain that in this state we don’t legally have to accept out-of-state IDs, blah blah blah. She was actually very understanding and there was no scene or issue. Her other friends arrive and they move to a table I informed their server about the fake ID. It is around this time that the assistant manager who had been drinking bloody marys at the bar next door all morning and then napping in the office came over.
He then starts telling me that I don’t know what a fake ID looks like and I don’t have the right to refuse service and how stupid I am. He then tells me I have to serve the girl. I inform him that I have the legal right to refuse service, and he cannot force me to. Anyway, I go home and post on Facebook about my day, and then include a photo of when I was managing a liquor store holding a device of medieval defense made out of all the fake IDs we had confiscated in one year. Also a crown. The next day I was called in and let go for refusing to cooperate with management and what have you.
Comcast Came After Him For That Tweet
“Comcast fired me for a tweet I made. Here’s what happened:
Someone on my timeline posted an article about Comcast customer service. Someone replied to him saying, ‘Wow, Comcast actually has customer service? lol!’
Working in customer service myself, I reply (from a personal account that is in no way connected with my job) with the tweet, ‘Yup, we do. We complain about management as much as you do.’
Comcast did not like that. Despite my having zero personal details on Twitter, they somehow still figured out it was me. I realized after that I had GPS auto-locate on for my tweets, so I suppose they could have looked through that data to figure out where I lived. (I checked, and it’s clear what house I live in whenever I tweet about being home.)
Anyway, the point is, they linked the account back to me and fired me for suggesting the employees are anything other than 100% happy all day at work. Seriously, that’s almost what they said to me when they fired me. The best I can recall it was: ‘You said the employees aren’t happy. We can’t have people suggesting the employees are in any way unhappy with management, it makes us look bad as a company. Comcast has worked extremely hard to get the reputation it currently has and things like this will make people see Comcast in a negative light, which is unacceptable.’
They also implied (though did not outright state) they’re letting legal look at it to see if they have a libel case against me. It’s been five months and I haven’t heard a dang thing from them, so I assume not.
The weirdest part was, the woman firing me seemed completely unaware the general public hates Comcast.”
