Professional Darwinism: Update to OP on p.74

[pierrotlunaire0]

I have a bronze medalist from back in the day when I worked for a telephone systems company, my sister had a gold at a bank.

Bronze: Sales rep decides to look for another job.  He makes up a package, consisting of his resume, a partial listing of our company top customers, and a letter that promised, "If you hire me, I'll bring the complete list!"  He then proceeds to send out his package to all of our major competitors using company stationary, company postage, and he told the mail room clerk to mail it for him.  He was fired one hour later, and was only allowed to walk out with his personal belongings.

Gold: Manager Trainee is Just.Not.Getting.It.  Major mistake after stupid major mistake.  One day, one of her customers brings back a money order the Trainee had processed for her.  "I wanted a $40 money order, and this is wrong."  The money order was for $51,219.89!  So my sister is fixing the mistake, the trainee is crying, "I don't what my problem is!"  Finally, they let the trainee leave early because she was so distraught she was useless.  After she left, my sister finally figured out where the goofy dollar amount came from: it was that day's date (May 12, 1989)!  A little while later, someone goes to file something in the Trainee's desk drawer, and that's when they find 2 empty fifths of vodka.  Hence the source of all the stupid errors.  The next morning, when she came into work, HR was waiting for her.  At least they caught her before she caused the bank serious losses.

[sbtier]

You people work in interesting offices.    When I was a teenager, I worked at a large department store.  Each cashier emptied their till into a bag, the cashier kept the same bag all week and then it was counted at the end of the week and compared to the register receipts.  Managment got suspicious about one cashier and decided to count her bag every night for a couple of weeks.  Turns out she was 'borrowing' large sums of money from her till and returning it later in the week.   She was fired.

[siamesecat2965]

I've also seen articles online in some newspapers about people who would post their activities on Facebook when they called in sick, and been fired for it.  You would think such things would get around and people would know NOT to be so public with their "cheating the system".   

You would think people have enough sense NOT to do stuff like that.  But apparently not.  Just another reason why you shoudl keep your work and personal life separate!  I'm on FB - and have a few people from both my jobs as friends. But that being said, I don't post a peep about either job, or make any work-related comments.  You just never know who may see it, and it may come back to bite you somewhere.

And on the rare occasions I've called out sick for a mental health day, I stay home!  I'm so afraid of heading to the mall or somewhere else and seeing someone from work!

[Miss March]

Here's a hotel story--

A waitress from the hotel restaurant became 'enamored' with the guest she served and she joined him upstairs in his hotel room that evening. The next morning she called the front desk to say she couldn't make it to her shift because she was sick. We could see that call was coming from room 310!!!!

[andi]

I had an employee who's "Dad" called in for her on Friday morning stating she was in the hospital having emergency surgery for ... i can't remember  (i believe something female related)  so she of course wouldn't be in for her shift that afternoon/ evening or her shift over the weekend.  Totally understandable.

Fast forward to Friday night when some friends and i are at a local dance hall.  Guess who's out on the dance floor cuttin' a rug with a beer in her hands!   We stood  and watched, stunned for a few minutes then she looked up and saw us.  THEN she actually came over and started chatting away, rambling on and on about turns out she didn't need surgery or something (she was not making any sense)

Needless to say, Monday morning wasn't much fun for her.


And hubby has tons of stories about people getting fired and losing carreers over stealing things like a $5 sandwhich or box of cupcakes.  Of course the woman that was drinking straight vokda out of her water bottle every day while running a department was interesting as well.

[PeasNCues]

When I was an administrative person in what was called the "pool," I was given any assignment that was handed out. One of them was to type up more than 500 or so award letters, print the labels and send the award letters and labels over to the Awards Department for processing and mailing out.

2 weeks later I get a phone call from Awards Department Head. They were very angry because half the documents were not completed. Shocked, I told them that I had finished ALL of the documents a day and a half earlier than they expected and that Awards Admin had called to personally thank me. Well, the Awards Department Head didn't believe me and accused me of not doing them at all. Luckily, my boss sat right next to me and took the phone from me to tell ADH that she KNEW I had done them all and was THERE when AD Admin had called me. ADH still didn't believe me and I had to retype over 250 letters and log and mail them out myself.

3 years later, I have the position of AD Admin. I had worked with them after the incident (because their admin would allow their filing and other menial work to pile up until it became "too much" and she needed my help to get it done - big red flag there) and they had been impressed with me and decided to hire me. It took some time, but they got me! When they finally hired me, they told me that about two months after the incident with the awards, their Awards Admin went on a two week vacation. Her stand-in had come into Awards Department Head's office with a box marked "Supplies" that she had found under AD Admin's desk. Poor stand in said, "I found these and I don't know what to do with them."

Yes, they were the 250 or so missing awards letters. Evidently AD Admin had decided that she didn't want to do her part of the job any more, so she thought if she just tucked it away no one would even think about it again.

I kind of resented that they never called and apologised about blaming me for the mess. But, AD Admin was fired when she came back from vacation and was still saying that it was not her fault. Evidently she "forgot" that she stored them there and everyone was against her. She even pulled the race card.

Thing is, she was in the position through which most of the admin who had made it into government had been in. It's the "if you want to get into gov't, work for AD department." So, she royally screwed up.

[Wulfie]

WOW some of these stories! 

Of course, I have one to add.   I had a coworker who fell at work and hurt her back. She was too hurt to work a job as a radio dispatcher (she could sit, lay down, walk, whatever she needed to do, the company was willing to accommodate her) no, no, no, she was hurting too bad to even move.

She bowled a perfect game one day and it was published in the paper. Not only did she get in trouble with the company but our insurance company reviewed her claim and they were not able to find any records of her going to the doctor she claimed to have been seeing. She was getting forged notes from her sister who worked for the doc. Both of them were fired and Sister went to jail for forgery (she had quite the profitable forgery ring going on behind everyones back) and Coworker almost went to jail as an accomplice but the court took pity on her and just gave her a HUGE amount of community service working with disabled people. I can't remember what happened to the doctor but he got in trouble as well for leaving his signature stamp unsecured.

[otterwoman]

DH had a coworker who was looking for a better job. Coworker went to a job interview one day. In his current company uniform. While driving the company's marked truck. The person who interviewed him was a friend of the guy's current boss.

Not only did he not get the new job, he got fired from the current one.

[Yvaine]

Here's a hotel story--

A waitress from the hotel restaurant became 'enamored' with the guest she served and she joined him upstairs in his hotel room that evening. The next morning she called the front desk to say she couldn't make it to her shift because she was sick. We could see that call was coming from room 310!!!!

I had a co-worker who did something similar. I worked at a snack bar that was part of a college's dining service. All of the on-campus phone numbers, if you dialed from one on-campus phone to another, would say the caller's extension on the voice mail, as in "Message from 4306: blah blah blah" or whatever.

But one of my co-workers didn't live on campus (I don't remember if he was a student at all) and didn't realize this. His girlfriend did live in the dorms, and one day he decided to spend some quality time with her instead of coming to work. He called from her room phone and left a voice mail saying that his car had broken down and he was stranded in City 2 Hours Away. Except the voice mail system gave him away...

This was in 1996. He'd probably get away with it now; he'd use his cell!

[Nannerdoman]

Wow.    Some of these posts are shockers!

I'd like to report about the database guy who used to have regularly mid-afternoon 'telephone conferences' in one of the meeting rooms at the back of the building.  One day someone went in to give him a telephone message and found him asleep in the comfy chair.  I can't really say it was a case of Professional Darwinism though, as he never got fired.

"No!  No!  Not the comfy chair!!"  (Thank you, Monty Python.)

[2littlemonkeys]

We had a woman who had a scheme going where she was skimming off petty cash requests.  She got busted while she was on maternity leave and her stand-in was contacted by the accounting department and eventually figured the whole thing out.  

I'm still not entirely clear about how she was able to do this without anyone noticing but she was padding the Travelers Check advances after they were signed and approved by the traveler and director and pocketing the difference.  I'm just that she was able to do this for almost a year before someone in accounting said "Hey, I notice that you have a TCheck request for $1500 but you only reported $1000 of that."

I do know that my own director is the reason we're only allowed $300 a day in travelers checks and $150 in total of petty cash.  She would take out thousands of dollars in TChecks for a day trip ("Oh, I'll probably have to take the client to dinner.") and then have $500 in receipts.  Which is fine, as long as you pay the rest of it back to the company either by check or by unused TChecks.  But she never did.  I spent an entire year chasing her around for missing money (which she kept trying to claim she paid back but could never produce the receipts accounting would have given her) before she finally got fired.  They changed the policy of how much a person could take out per trip and froze anyone from taking money if they had outstanding advances.  Which, you know, makes sense.  

[kingsrings]

I didn’t witness this, just heard about it after the fact. Long ago in high school, I worked at a Dairy Queen. An employee was at the counter, making a customer a Blizzard. She had to mix it with a spoon, and after doing so, took the spoon out of the Blizzard, carefully and thoroughly licked it clean, and then put it back into the Blizzard. This was all done right in front of the customers and managers. Yeah, she was fired.

[Friday]

My DH used to be the operations person for a branch office of a financial services floor.  He would take in all branch paperwork and send it to the main branch for filing/finish processeing, etc.  Everything was supposed to go through the branch per policy, but it was not unheard of for things to go right from a broker to downtown if DH was out, branch manager approved, etc.

One day, DH got a call from the husband of a co-worker.  Said co-worker (let's call her Amy) was the assistant to the branch manager.  Amy's hubby asked DH to look up the balance in a joint account.  DH did, and it was $2.  Amy's hubby got upset; the account should have had 30K in it.

DH ordered the transfer paperwork and transaction history, discovered that it had been sent directly to the main office, not going through him.  He pulled the signature card from the file and discovered an obvious forgery.  The money had been transfered from their joint account to Amy's personal account.  A big NO-NO legally.

Turns out, Amy was worried that her hubby would spend the money on drugs.  He had a big problem and a couple of days later, went into rehab.  He also signed off on the transfer after the fact, making it legal.  However, the firm took the view that she broke regulations by bypassing DH and fired her for cause.  They chose not to prosecute, since her hubby did sign the paperwork, and thus kept the firm out of the SEC's bad graces, but they did have her series 7 license yanked, which keeps her from working at that level in that field.

While I sympathize with her position (my DS was an addict and I had to keep a lot locked up), she showed intent and knowledge of breaking the rules by bypassing DH and she could have looked for legal help in protecting the money.  Even if she lost the 30K, she lost a lot more (I estimate her job at 50K/yr or more).

[HushHush]

My borther used to be a site manager for an after school care program run by our city at local schools.  The employees were usually college students and paid decently for only 5 hours a day of work.  A lot of the parents paid in cash at the end of the week and one of the employees was designated to give receipts and balance the books.

Can you see where this is going?

One Friday morning, db discovers they have an extra receipt book in the supply cabinet and it isn't the same brand as the regular one.  He starts to flip through it and notices all the receipts are for cash and after digging through the attendence records and payment records in the real receipt book.

An employee was using a separate receipt book for the cash payments, pocketing the cash and then LEFT THE SCAM RECEIPT BOOK IN THE SUPPLY CLOSET!

She was fired shortly thereafter.

[sabwafaire]

Oh, I have a story too!

Many years ago I worked in an environment that required people monitoring equipment 24/7.  Management realized that certain items were going missing over the course of several weeks, so they set up a camera.  They told us this.  They showed us where the camera was mounted and where in the room it was aimed.  They told us when it was going live.

Graveyard coworker came in about a week after the camera was set up.  Since he was the only one there, he proceeded to pull out a little TV from under his desk.  Then he lit a cigarette.  Then, pulled a beer out of his backpack and got comfy.  He was fired.

He said he forgot the camera was there.....