I was working in the IT admin office for a time while doing software development, and got to witness this guy who came in to have his laptop fixed/swapped; and he said “You guys don’t like, check the laptops for files and stuff, right?”.
And the IT guy was legendary, didn’t skip a beat, was like “Nah, nah, we don’t have time for that crap.”.
As soon as the guy was out of the room, we checked his laptop’s files.
Porn. So much porn. Like, gigs of it, and this was in the early 2000’s when that meant a lot.
We went to HR, and they called him up and reviewed, and SOMEHOW, he dodged the bullet and they retained him. The reason? It was his porn. You read that right. He had gigs of porn of him banging his stripper GF on his laptop, and because it wasn’t “downloaded” porn, he got off.
Then a month later he was let go when he was found taking pictures with his cell phone over the cubicle wall of a female employee without her knowledge.
But I’ll never forget the mental gymnastics that happened to convince HR that porn only meant pictures of “other people” being naked, not himself and his GF.
I have a similar story. One of the security guards was found to have a hard drive full of BDSM porn. When interrogated about it, she said “It’s not pornography. Those are my holiday photos.” And sure enough, she was the one holding the whip.
The compromise reached was that she wouldn’t put her holiday photos on her office computer any more.
A kid got fired for finding a pen on the ground. Person returned for the pen and then called corporate claiming the kid stole the pen
OK, so we were having a Christmas luncheon at work. HR made the flyer. It said “Holiday” party. Somebody felt that was part of the war on Christmas, and crossed out Holiday and wrote Christmas. That wasn’t the issue. Another guy took offense to that guy, and made a counterfeit flyer for the company Cthulu summoning. It said that the human sacrifice would be at 12, lunch at 1 so bring a change of clothes. He posted those all over.
That’s a firing.
Watched a guy with an iPad stuffed down the front of his pants walk out through a metal detector. The outline and part of the box were very visible.
Not quite fired but close enough. I know a guy who had gotten his 100% disability from the military during his first enlistment (basically only worked for about 2 years and then medical said he was borked so he was going to collect a paycheck for the rest of his life)
Then he popped positive for smoking weed on a random drug test and lost it all. Now he’s being discharged on an ‘other than honorable’ which means he loses all his benefits.
