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

Ghost of Ashenfelter wrote:

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

Welcome to the world of modern high school teaching.

I was fired for proposing to my girlfriend, we worked in the same office. Now this is the shitty part. She was my boss's mistress and I had no idea. I dated her for 14 months and proposed only to find out she was banging my boss, and then I got fired for proposing to her because there weren't supposed to be office relationships.

Amateur Eater wrote:

I was fired for proposing to my girlfriend, we worked in the same office. Now this is the shitty part. She was my boss's mistress and I had no idea. I dated her for 14 months and proposed only to find out she was banging my boss, and then I got fired for proposing to her because there weren't supposed to be office relationships.

This one's the winner.

dagewfdsf wrote:

Amateur Eater wrote:

I was fired for proposing to my girlfriend, we worked in the same office. Now this is the shitty part. She was my boss's mistress and I had no idea. I dated her for 14 months and proposed only to find out she was banging my boss, and then I got fired for proposing to her because there weren't supposed to be office relationships.

This one's the winner.

Agreed. Wow!

Nursery boy wrote:

The boss said "if everyone did this every time it rained, do you know how much it would cost each year?

About $15?

you dodged a big bullet there, buddy. hope you're getting to know your dates a little better these days

Amateur Eater wrote:

I was fired for proposing to my girlfriend, we worked in the same office. Now this is the shitty part. She was my boss's mistress and I had no idea. I dated her for 14 months and proposed only to find out she was banging my boss, and then I got fired for proposing to her because there weren't supposed to be office relationships.

I was accused of harassment for jokingly saying "you're so fired" to a particularly fragile employee, and also supposedly calling her fat. I had no idea of the depths of her neuroses until I got drawn into a dispute resolution process with her over that accusation.

I can tell you it causes an unbelievable amount of stress to be accused of harassment, even if in your heart of hearts (and in the eyes of your peers and direct supervisor) it isn't true. Harassment is one of those things where in practice you are guilty until proven innocent, and there's no way to prove you're innocent.

I did say "you're so fired" but in an obviously ironic way with a big smile on my face. There's no way in hell I've ever called an employee fat. But when she says I called her fat, it's hard to convince otherwise level-headed people the truth.

chubb wrote:

George Costanza wrote:

I had sex with the cleaning lady. Was that wrong?

Well played!

Not really. At this point, any reference to Seinfeld is a) dated, and b) just plain played out. Har har, we've all seen it a million times. Do yourself a favor and quote a more recent comedy.

I like this thread.

I used to work at an ice cream shop where the owner just spent all day walking around looking for things we needed to do. This owner was also big on customer service and I was constantly getting reprimanded for not immediately stopping whatever I was doing to wait on a customer. One day She literally screamed at me over this. So right after this conversation, while she was still standing there, I was making an ice cream cone when a customer walks up. I dropped the cone and let the machine continue running. I would say about 5 pounds of ice cream was on the ground before she saw it. For some strange reason not only did I not get fired, but she cleaned it up without ever saying anything to me about it.

Francis L wrote:

chubb wrote:

Well played!

Not really. At this point, any reference to Seinfeld is a) dated, and b) just plain played out. Har har, we've all seen it a million times. Do yourself a favor and quote a more recent comedy.

There are no recent comedies worth quoting.

Why did the janitor complain about that? Where should the ice cubs go? That is pretty weird. How did you get into "trouble"? Where did the administration suggest she put ice cubs in the future? This is weird.

_____________________________________________

Oh, I only got an email from administration asking me to tell my runners to NOT put the ice cubes in the sink.

But, don't we have so much more to worry about than ice cubes?

So, I told the kids to empty their ice bags in the grass.

Meanwhile, there are 3-4 other sports (volleyball, golf, cheerleading, & football) that use those locker rooms too!

Oh well.

IRunXC wrote:

Francis L wrote:

Not really. At this point, any reference to Seinfeld is a) dated, and b) just plain played out. Har har, we've all seen it a million times. Do yourself a favor and quote a more recent comedy.

There are no recent comedies worth quoting.

Going to have to agree to disagree on that one, my friend. Always Sunny in Philly; Curb your Enthusiasm (last season w/ the Seinfeld cast was funnier than anything from the original Seinfeld); Eastbound and Down; Californication. All very solid recent comedies. Granted, you might have to join Netflix to watch them, but it will be worth your time and $$.

I was caught spanking the monkey in the boss's bathroom

Over a long career I had two bosses say that I didn't put in enough hours. 45 to 50 per week (w/o extra compensation, and at best a moderate salary) was not enough for them.

Was caught having sex with a co-worker in a bathroom after hours. We were caught by my supervisor whom I had sex with in the same place a week before.

I was unemployed the next day, but the awesome memories remain.

Owl Runer wrote: Was caught having sex with a co-worker in a bathroom after hours.

Not that there's anything wrong with that?

(to extend the Seinfeldian theme)

Francis L wrote:

Do yourself a favor and quote a more recent comedy.

I decided to cut down trees and stump them rather than de-root them. Big hassle. Boss didn't like it.

Story Time:

Before I quit working in my lab at Duke, my boss hired a new undergraduate to pick up some of the slack in our lab. I may not have been terribly impressive, but my ignorance paled in comparison to our newest undergraduate. My presumptive replacement had little acumen for working in a lab environment, showed minimal incentive to learn, and displayed even less common sense. I was responsible for training her, all the while fighting the constant urge to knock a hole in her head to let some brains in.

On one occasion, I asked the undergraduate- we’ll call her Katrina, after the hurricane- to gather and wash everyone’s lab coats. It was a simple job, one that didn’t require her to get her hands dirty. Our lab employed a cleaning service that would pick up the coats and return them the next day; all she needed to do was gather the garments and place them in the hall for collection. I had explained this to her a week before, so I had few qualms about assigning her the task and returning to viewing internet pornography and other important matters of science.

It was only after half an hour had elapsed with no sign of Katrina did I begin to become worried. In her few short months in the lab, Katrina had done some questionable things: spilling ethidium bromide (a rather toxic substance) on herself, freaking out and attempting to activate the emergency shower when we told her it was a mutagen, and a separate incident involving a freezer burn and a sensitive portion of the human anatomy. Still, how could you screw this up?

Just as I was about to lumber out of my chair to investigate, Katrina turned up. “Noah, I’m having a problem with the washing machine,” she said.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“It won’t turn off. I tried everything.”

We didn’t have a washing machine.

“Show me the problem,” I said carefully.

Katrina led me down the hall to the room where we did molecular biology. “There,” she said, pointing. In the middle of the room, our large ultracentrifuge was running at near full speed.

Let’s pause for a moment to compare an ultracentrifuge to a washing machine:

One looks like a $100,000 piece of scientific equipment for collecting microscopic particle of matter. The other looks like a washing machine.

And something was definitely wrong with the ultracentrifuge; the machine was emitting a high, unhealthy whine. I suddenly felt like Han Solo when he first spots the Death Star.

“That’s no washing machine!” I yelled, racing across the room and yanking the plug. As the machine wound down, I turned to Katrina, picturing us both getting fired for destroying a $100,000 machine in perhaps the dumbest incident in the history of modern science. “Please, please, please tell me you didn’t put anything in here,” I begged.

Katrina’s look told me all I needed to know. The machine chuffed a final time and wheezed to a stop. I cracked the door, and an acrid stench wafted out of the main chamber. No less than half a dozen lab coats had been stuffed en masse into the gaping maw of the machine. They were soaked in detergent (I had no idea where she even found this). According to the timer, the machine had been running at 50,000 Gs for almost 12 minutes. The rotor had been removed, and the threads of the central shaft had snared several of the lab coats, wrapping them around the rapidly spinning crank arm.

Friction + Natural Fiber = Fire.

This suspicion was confirmed when a wafting bit of smoke curled up from the still-smoldering remains of the pile of soapy, highly flammable lab coats. True to form, Katrina took this as an opportunity to press the panic button, fleeing and yelling fire, but succeeding only in hastening the spreading of word of our idiocy.

As I look down again, the smoldering pile of ruined coat decides to make a go of it, and puffs into a lazy, halfhearted flame. I considered peeing on the fire to put it out, but settled on using phosphate-buffered saline, an equally salty liquid of similar acidity.

As I quenched the flames, a still-panicked Katrina, having completed a circuit of the building where she advertised her idiocy, returned, accompanied by several worried bystanders.

“Hey, Katrina,” I asked her, “just out of curiosity, which machine were you planning on sticking these into to dry them?”

The story has a happy ending. Amazingly, the centrifuge recovered with few signs of injury. Katrina discovered that her true calling was elsewhere. She now decorates cakes for a living. Most importantly, I was not fired prematurely for failing to use a child leash on an incompetent employee. We even washed the lab coats, losing only two to the conflagration.

You might say we all got away clean.