Worst Dismissals/Firings/Layoffs You've Seen/Experienced

[Kneel B4 Zod]

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No particular firing, but the white-collar company I used to work at shipped people out the door within an hour or less of them giving notice.

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This is standard.

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I have no work real work experience, but this sounds pretty degrading. Bison's post about being gone in 3 minutes sounds very very degrading.

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I was walked out of the first job I quit. I gave my 2 weeks and was walked out 2 hours later. This was very standard at this company.

my buddy was laid off from Morgan Stanley (with a group) and was walked out by security that moment. I think he could take 1 box off his desk and anything else was mailed to him?

oh and when my whole group was laid off, I had tried (and failed) to log on to my computer an hour earlier. I told my boss and he panicked and got IT to fix it. I later found out that IT had mistakenly disabled everyones passwords 2 hours too soon. so now whenever I forget my password, I figure I'm about to be laid off.

[talentdeficit]

i have three.

i was in college and working part time at chapters (canadian version of barnes & noble). i walked in the front door for my shift, and 90% of my coworkers (including a couple of mid level managers) had moved all the couches over next to the in-store starbucks and were kicking back not doing any work. i was almost late, so i went and started my shift. the only cashier actually working asked me, kinda suprised like, 'oh! they're keeping you too?' apparently the store was being closed that day, and they were telling people only as their shifts ended. a few people were offered jobs at other locations, but most were not. i spent the rest of my shift at the party over by the starbucks.

the second was when i did some contracting work for a very sketchy software development house. their 'offices' were a warehouse in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of those folding tables. all the employees (and contractors) had to check out laptops to use each day. i showed up one day, and the supervisor with the key to the laptop room hadn't shown up and neither had the site manager. i left for the day early to go to the beach, went back the next day and the entire building was locked up. i got a check a few weeks later that bounced, so i guess we all got laid off?

third was another contracting job at a much more reputable company. there was a security breach during my employment and an investigation was launched. on a thursday morning when everyone was in the office we were all called into a conference room for a project meeting. we were then locked in while security searched every coat, bag, computer, ect for evidence. they found a usb thumb drive in one guy's bag (prohibited) and a utility for copying files to an ipod harddrive on another guy's machine and fired both on the spot before unlocking the rest of us.

[neuroman]

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No particular firing, but the white-collar company I used to work at shipped people out the door within an hour or less of them giving notice.

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This is standard.

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I thought 2 weeks notice was standard.

When I resigned, I was out the door with a 40oz in my hand within an hour's time. What a great afternoon that was.

[cmoke]

I worked for a company based in Australia for about 3 years (U.S. branch was 3 people, salesman, secretary, and technician-me). I was being overworked and underpaid so I kept insisting on them hiring somone, they kept saying they would but never did. After 6 months of this I decided to protest by using my sick days I had like 10 saved up. After the 4th day, I received a letter firing me and I never talked to anyone in the company again and never went back.

my two scents [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[grandgnu]

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No particular firing, but the white-collar company I used to work at shipped people out the door within an hour or less of them giving notice.

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This is standard.

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I thought 2 weeks notice was standard.

When I resigned, I was out the door with a 40oz in my hand within an hour's time. What a great afternoon that was.

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It's standard as an employee to provide your employer with 2 weeks notice if YOU plan to leave the job (so they have time to find a replacement)

But if you're getting canned, it's common to get rid of you as soon as possible (since how loyal can they expect you to be for 2 weeks if you know you're losing your job?)

[RiverFenix]

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I bounced a half million dollar check. I got fired.

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More to it?

[wdcbooks]

I had started a job about six months prior. I got a voice message saying there was a mandatory voice conference call at 10:00 am the next morning. I signed into the call and a pre-recorded voice starting droning about corporate restructuring and the need to forge ahead. It took me about ten minutes to realize we were all being fired by pre recorded conference call.

My region employed 52 people with the same job. Most of the guys had been there for a long time, and some of them for decades. About half an hour after the call was over my boss called me and one other guy to notify us that the two of us weren't fired, but everyone else was. Basically I was expected to do the work of 26 now fired people. Bizarrely it also came with a 40% raise.

I already hated the job and it was a job I could do without ever seeing my boss. So I started looking for a new job kind of half heartedly and did absolutely nothing for the next six months. That was the most dysfunctional company in my industry and still is. With the raise I was making a fairly gross amount of money for sitting on my ass all day and never going to work. I kind of miss it.

[cliff]

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No particular firing, but the white-collar company I used to work at shipped people out the door within an hour or less of them giving notice.

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This is standard.

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Absolutely. this is the only way I have seen this done. You generally don't want unhappy people near their computers where they can start copying sensitive material to outside emails, etc. Some people also get angry and violent upon firing/layoff.

The worst I saw was a bunch of names called over the company intercomm to a meeting. At the time, I thought the list was weird because they were all from different groups and areas. When they got to the main conference room, the head of hr evidently came out and announced a mass layoff. There is nothing I have seen quite so bad as a smallish startup company going under.

At the same company, I came in on a weekend and saw the IT guys cleaning out offices for people about to go on Monday. Luckily mine wasn't among them, but it was still awkward.

mike

[neuroman]

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No particular firing, but the white-collar company I used to work at shipped people out the door within an hour or less of them giving notice.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is standard.

[/ QUOTE ]
I thought 2 weeks notice was standard.

When I resigned, I was out the door with a 40oz in my hand within an hour's time. What a great afternoon that was.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's standard as an employee to provide your employer with 2 weeks notice if YOU plan to leave the job (so they have time to find a replacement)

But if you're getting canned, it's common to get rid of you as soon as possible (since how loyal can they expect you to be for 2 weeks if you know you're losing your job?)

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I guess I was unclear. This place threw EVERYONE out the door in under an hour, whether the employee was being fired or had resigned of his own accord.

[octopi]

I've got a few stories. I used to work at Home Depot, and due to laws within the company, we had to have Christmas parties on site. Yes, we 'partied' in the lumber aisle.

They were dry events as a result but they still served sparkling apple juice as some sort of cheap token of apology. There were many jokes that evening about getting tanked on it, and we all got a bit uncomfortable when the new janitor started to talk a bit louder and be a bit jokier. He was a weird guy to begin with, but he was definitely being even weirder.

The next day, the extra bottles of sparkling juice sat in the lunchroom fridge until it was decided what was to be done with them. I guess at one point, the janitor came in with his mop bucket, opened the fridge and casually started filling his bucket with the bottles. WHILE PEOPLE WATCHED. He then started to whistle and pushed the bottles, covered by the mop, out of the room.

Later on, the managers went to investigate and found the janitorial room full of full bottles. When they brought him to his locker, he opened it and empty bottles fell out. He thought he was fired for being drunk on the job and asked if he could atleast keep a few bottles to drink his sorrows away, as they escorted him out.

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This actually reminds me of another Home Depot story.

I used to work with a girl at the Returns desk who used to continually complain she couldn't stand and do her job due to a back injury she had sustained at Home Depot. Everyone suspected she was just milking the system because she wasn't really behaving like a hurt person should. She had also been accused of similar things at her last job.

One night, while out at the bar with some work people, I was fooling around with my new digital camera when a coworker pointed out the girl in question grinding on the dance floor, bending way over backwards and trying to lift another coworker. I snapped a few photos.

The next day at work, she flipped out. I hadn't really planned on doing anything with them (investigators at worker's comp take care of that) but she got really nervous and edgy. Eventually rumor got around and she knew what had happened. She was called into the office to do some paperwork for her worker's comp claim, totally innocuously. She read the situation wrong, flipped out, said "You can't fire me, I quit" and as she left the building spit at me and said "Nice photography". It was an awesome scene.

edit: I guess I should have clarified these weren't really 'bad' firings, just really funny ones the people getting canned handled poorly, not necessarily the management.