This was always going to be a gamble.
I got the flick for placing a bet or 19.
Years ago I worked in a small kitchen as a sous chef. I worked with two other blokes, Don and Charlie. Our boss the head chef was called Tex. His idea of work was to peer over the top of the paper and shout orders at us.
As you would imagine the usual rush times were busy but being such a small kitchen and well staffed it was very easy to keep clean and take stock of. Which left us frequently with hours of free time on our hands between shifts. So we all used to watch the geegees (horse racing) on tv. Eventually this led us to making bets with each other. Some times we'd win sometimes we'd lose - we deliberately kept the bets small because we really weren't out to filch each other out of our meagre pay-checks. We even developed a working slang; a "chunk" was $5, a "piece" was $10 and "slab" was $20 - which also happened to be about the price of a carton (or slab) of beer at the time.
This betting habit gradually began to encroach on our working time as well. Often even when we were flat-chat either Don, Charlie or myself would surreptitiously sneak into the back office to check on a race and then return to make book with the other two shouting their bets out - "I'll have a piece on no. 7" or "Put me down for a slab on 18" or something like that. Now Tex had noticed this increasing activity and the impact it was having on our work so he called us aside one day and warned us to keep it on the quiet because if it kept us from going hammer and tongs during our busy periods "heads would roll" as he put it. Advice which we promptly ignored and got straight back into trying to see who could lose the most money to each other each day.

Eventually it came to a head one day when the owner Owen Perkins turned up and caught us at it. Now Owen was a bourbon swilling beast of a man. But he was staunchly against any form of gambling. Once he'd seen Charlie watching the tv and then come out to take our bets - at a time when the orders were mounting up on the bench he stormed into Tex's back office, slammed the door and shouted at him for a good ten minutes and then departed after giving us all a filthy scowl. Tex strolled out of his office looking brow-beaten. "I warned you guys," he said. "I told you someone would have to go." He took me aside and explained to me that since mine was the bet Owen had heard Charlie take, I was out on my ear. I protested meekly but to be honest I knew that there was little to be done. "I've got to know, just out of interest - what was the bet?" Tex asked me.
"I had a piece on Don's and my own mount." was my reply.
(mankwhistle, Thu 29 May 2014, 23:36, 7 replies)

I've had my entire department let go (twice), worked for a company that's gone out of business, and had my contract not renewed, and quit several jobs
The only time I was actually sacked I was working for this shitty low-grade gold mine in the middle of nowhere. The owners seemed to have only hired relatives, so I was the odd one out. It started with me putting this fieldie on night-shift. She was the engineer's daughter, and fucked up by sending a pile of ore to the waste heaps. They told me I shouldn't have put her on nights as she wasn't up to it, and my response was "why have we hired her if she's incompetent?", which didn't go down well. My boss, the chief geo, was an aggressive little shit prone to screaming abuse, and had some sort of personal issue I never got to the bottom of. I only had two competent fieldies, both ex-geos (it was a tough time in the industry).
I desperately needed another, and hired one. However when he was due to fly out to the mine, he complained he had an ear infection. My boss told him he better get on the plane if he wanted the fucking job. He did and his eardrum burst. My boss lost the plot with one of my remaining competent fieldies when he arrived 10 minutes late one morning, calling him a motherfucker and a cunt, all very professional. My fieldie quit on the spot, saying he didn't have to take this abuse.
Anyway, I asked for a meeting with my boss and said that I cant do days and nights with only one competent fieldie. He said he didn't have to explain himself to me. The next day I get called in to a meeting and told my services were no longer required. A bit stunned at being fired, I said as far as I was concerned I'd done everything required and expected to be paid out to the end of my contract, about 6 more months. They immediately agreed. I was planning to leave at end anyway so this was the best outcome I could have hoped for, and my gobsmackedness slowly turned to joy, though it still rubs a bit, the fuckers. That night before I flew out I got massively stoned with the metallurgist, there turned to be quite a group who regularly smoked that I only discovered on my last night, who proceeded to tell me some sad tale that he was going out with prostitute and it was tearing him up inside, and I gave him what advice I could to try and make him feel better about his patently horrible judgement. This much I remember.
( cumquat may will not be commenting further on the allegations, Thu 29 May 2014, 22:45, Reply)

I got sacked for "stealing" my own stuff
2005. I was one of the main chefs in a busy, very trendy and overpriced cafe. I had a baby-faced boss, who thought he was god's gift to women. I didn't fancy him, so he had a grudge. He treated all the younger workers like shit, unless he was seducing them. etc. etc.

A 15-year-old girl on work experience was set to work cleaning the toilets and serving at the bar. I objected and the other staff downed tools with me. I not only got sacked, but also accused of stealing MY OWN recipes when I left. This was a feeble attempt to stop me claiming benefits, or the pay I was owed.

So ...I went back late at night and drew a huge purple cock on the front signage. Took 'em ages to get it off. Childish, yeah, but friends made a point of swinging by for months afterwards to give me updates on it.
(IHateSprouts is baking a huge pie shaped like an enormous pie, Thu 29 May 2014, 22:19, 36 replies)

I hope to hear lots of wise and well-informed advice on employment and discrimination legislation from all the internet lawyers this week.
preferably from whichever hilarious spoof accounts liebert and fairholme are using
( Dr. Shambolic je suis charlie, Thu 29 May 2014, 21:51, 1 reply)

I made some silly posts on the internet.
So someone grassed me up to my boss and I totally got sacked.
( Amorous Badger NAKED BEA ARTHUR PHOTOS 4U, Thu 29 May 2014, 21:27, 22 replies)

Worked at a restaurant with excellent burgers and coked-out, overbearing managers
Made it nine months before getting sacked for "drinking on the job" and "stealing." My crime? After cleaning up weekend brunch things, there's usually a tiny bit of mimosa left at the bottom of the pitcher - rather than dump it out I took it back to the kitchen and took a swig (there was literally a swig in it). Took the edge off, that I'll totally admit.

The manager who fired me was himself later fired for getting caught going to the tiny hotel down the street, also owned by the restaurant owner, doing blow and boffing his mistress. Now I get flashbacks and shudders everytime I see bald men with thick glasses.
( AgentMuu hentai coordination, Thu 29 May 2014, 20:57, 2 replies)

I think I'm being sacked now
Management stopped talking to me. I haven't had a work assignment in four months. I know they hate confrontation, so they're probably screwing up the courage to do it, but they can't seem to find anybody to plunge the knife. Can't blame them, really. But for the moment, I get full pay and benefits to read everything on B3ta. It's a Kafkaesque nightmare. Locked in amber.
(Perv With A Dog had his eyes pecked out by scrub jays on, Thu 29 May 2014, 20:33, 5 replies)

I got sacked for drawing a Dick Butt on a colleague's birthday card
I chuckled when my manager's manager's described what I had drawn during the disciplinary hearing. It didn't work in my favour I guess. They didn't like me anyway.
(Jean-Brian Zatapathique, Thu 29 May 2014, 20:22, 3 replies)

While I was a student
I used to work in an off licence directly underneath the flat I used to live in - I rented a room in a house with a family of five.

Yes, we could drink as much stock as we wanted - but we had to pay for it (full price, too, no staff discount or anything).
I had just closed up one night, on the phone to a girl I liked at the time, when a mate pulled up in his ancient Fiat - so I finish the call and let him in.
"I've got a bottle of vodka!" he explained - "AND some greenery!"
Well, we couldn't really smoke in the house - as it wasn't MY house to smoke in - but I did have the keys to the off licence - and we did used to smoke in the stock room.

So, we drank the vodka, smoked some weed, then got cracking into the beers in the stock room. A literally limitless supply! We were having quite a good laugh, carried on being daft 'till about 3:00 in the morning - then went upstairs to crash out. We were just entering the house when the youngest son - probably 15 or so - enquired "did you see the cops 'round here earlier?"
I said we hadn't.
"Yeah, about two o'clock - two of them sniffing about right outside the offy back doors" he explained.

Christ. Well, they didn't knock on the offy's back door, and there was no sign of them now = no problem.

Went to bed, woke up, my mate left. Eventually went to work again later in the day - when my boss pulls me aside and asks me: "Why was the silent alarm pressed at 1:45 in the morning?"

Turns out - while I was having a much needed piss, my mate was wondering what the unusual switch was on the wall of the stock room, and pressed it. Pressed it several times, in fact, as nothing appeared to be happening. Hence the police turning up and mooching about - luckily we had tidied up all of the massive drugs though, I never got it in the neck for that. Was kicked out of work there and then.

The next week I started a job in the town hall - which eventually paid about £250 a week. This was tax free as I was a student - five times as much as what I was earning in the offy! Socially ruined my weekends, but the drinks were free (absolutely NO stock control), and it gave me experience of working behind a bar, managing staff, and working as a supervisor in a food court in a leisure centre. Great job, terrific pay.

Then I got sacked from that for lending the keys to the squash courts out.
(SigourneysBeaver took off and nuked the entire site from orbit on, Thu 29 May 2014, 19:17, 31 replies)

Back when I had escaped the tyranny of dealing with the general public I got a job as a driver
and an assistant field survey technician for Hutchison Communications, the company that would later be rebranded 'Orange'.

Driving a Discovery I'd transport the lead tech up to a site where the planners decided one cell would be best served by the mast. To check its viability we'd tow a temporary mast (15 or 45 metre telescopic on an trailer)up the muddy Welsh hillside in question, erect the mast and secure it with guy ropes attached to metre-long metal pickets banged into the ground with a sledgehammer. On the top of the mast was an antenna hooked into a 1.86GHz signal generator in the base to simulate a cell base station signal. Getting up these muddy Welsh hillsides is why the vehicle of choice was a 4x4 of proper offroading ability -but even then when you're towing an extra 1.5 tons of telescopic mast things could get hairy, so the car had the mandatory winch fitted.

Then I'd drive a route around the perimeter of the proposed cell and the lead tech would read and log the signal strength to see if it would suffice.

The disco had been extensively modified, behind the back seat was the spectrum analyser, receiver, monochrome 80 column text display laptop logging the position (using a LORAN receiver or whatever the precursor of GPS was) and field strength to be mapped later on back at base. To facilitate this rather hefty parasitic load on the 12V systems a second alternator was fitted to the engine just for the electronics.

Other times we'd go to a newly built mast before the network was open to the public, drive around the cell perimeter again but instead, dial in on the network to a selection of answerphones that had been loaded with speaking books, so as to simulate voice traffic, and note if there were any dropped calls and noting if there was the proper handover from one sector to the next as you went around the mast.

Finally at some time we'd put a xenon high intensity lamp on top of a 15 metre mast and another team would put a similar mast where the proposed line-of-site microwave link was supposed to be established and remotely trip a film camera (before digitals existed) on top of the other mast to snap in the direction of the first map- developing the film later the picture would show a tiiiiiiny little pinprick of light to show there was nothing in between the proposed microwave link.

All good fun, vaguely outdoorsy, lots of man-banter and some interesting tales from my lead tech who used to be in REME and had been around the world etc.

All fine and good, except two months in my gran had a stroke. The hospital she was taken to was about 20 miles away from where I lived in Edgbaston so I asked if I could borrow the survey vehicle overnight to visit her as I had no car at the time and the public transport would have stranded me from getting home.

I dutifully went up to visit gran, then coming home realised I had nothing in for tea, so I went to park up behind Edgbaston Tesco.

Oh hang on, it says 'maximum height 6 feet 6 inches' at the entrance to the car park. There's a rigid steel bar across the top of the entrance. This is a Land Rover Discovery, the roofline is pretty tall....flip down the sun visor where I was sure there was a sticker saying how high the car was. 196cm? That's (doing mental arithmetic) about the same.... maybe if I slide under it slowly it'll be alright?

Driving cautiously at about 0.3mph I tried to edge under the sign- so far so good. OK, must have made it. Nudged up to 1mph.

With a sickening screech the base of the LORAN antenna (which stood an extra two inches above the roofline and I'd completely forgotten about) transmitted the force of meeting the steel bar through to the roof of the Discovery, which buckled along the width of the car and the sheared base (screw-mounted into the roof instead of magmounted) and antenna dropped off onto the floor.

SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT.

Backed up and out, retrieved the antenna, drove off home gloomy about the prospect of a bollocking in the morning.

Next day I turned up to work before anyone else and tried to obtain a replacement LORAN antenna but it was no good- the base was knackered and the folded roofline was obvious to anyone with a working set of eyeballs. I came clean to the lead tech and fortunately that day the job didn't need positional information so we busied about getting the day's work done.

Returned to base at the end of the day to be summoned to see the manager. "Sit down" he said with quiet menace.

Very quietly he explained to me that the car would be out of commission for a few days while repairs were made- the team's target would slip ,and I shouldn't have gone out again in the same car. I was hopeful that this was a dressing down but it culminated in 'You're a liability. Get out.'

Rather upset I left to get the train back home. Small Heath train station was grim at the best of times but that day it had the black gloom of despair to add to its charm.
( Rotating Wobbly Hat That's not a banana. THIS is a banana., Thu 29 May 2014, 19:03, 1 reply)

I've been sacked a few times, on the most recent occasion it was over a fraudulant milage claim...
an honest (er) mistake, of one extra day, so about 20 quid. They refused to beleive that it was an (er) honest mistake, so told me it was gross misconduct. anyway, a large argument ensued which I tried to finish by destroying the evidence. I knew they only had one copy of my claim form and it was there in the office, I asked to look at it to show them how it could easily be an honest (er) mistake, and when they gave it to me, I begun to eat it. The construction manager went mad, much to my amusement and started screaming and turning a funny shade of red. A friend of mine was at the doorway in the office and had to turn away after catching the eye of my general manager, they were both sniggereing quietly. It would have been such a glorious moment had I not nearly choked trying to swallow a bit of paper that was too big. anyway, yeah. whatevs, I have a much better job now with a rival commpany and get paid to spend far too much time on b3ta and pretend to know things :D
( Glovington, Thu 29 May 2014, 17:29, 6 replies)

A mate of mine got an unexpected promotion
He was bumped up two levels. Then he was told that his first job was to fire the person who, until moments ago, had been his boss...
(moon monkey is busy making memories worth repressing, Thu 29 May 2014, 17:08, 4 replies)

In the 80's I worked as a driver for a Personal Hygiene Service Company.
My work was to drive to various places and change their used sanitary bins for clean ones. I also had to empty money out of their coin machines and top them up. I lasted two weeks. I wasn't what you would call 'good' at this job. I never got the hang of the separation between the clean bins and the filled up ones in the back of the van, therefore I am ashamed to say the odd customer got their bin taken away and replaced maybe with someone else's used bin. What added to my downfall was being called into office for the boss to reprimand me while nearly allowing urine to leak from her, because I had failed to secure a tampax machine front and it had knocked the next person inserting money on the head.
(maggied Riding the Gravy Train on, Thu 29 May 2014, 16:57, 2 replies)

Trefynwy isn't the most exciting
town to live in, especially as a teenager. I had a Saturday job in the local opticians, making the tea and ensuring all the specs on the stands were nice and clean.
In a drawer amongst all the glasses that were due to be picked up I found a smaller case, and opening it found very posh looking monocle. Obviously this would raise a laugh that night at the pub, so I 'borrowed' it.
Unfortunately not only did the manager see me in the pub wearing stolen goods, but I lost the bloody thing on the way home.
To cut a long story short - I was sacked for eyepiece in Monmouth.
( insignificantsnivellinglittleturd I Like Peas, Thu 29 May 2014, 16:44, 4 replies)

many years ago, my dad was a bank manager
one of his junior clerks, a young lad named mark, was a bit useless. his head was constantly in the clouds and he told everyone that he was going to be a famous singer because he was in a group. my dad gave him a few chances, but got more and more irate with his ineffectiveness. finally he had to go.

the final conversation went along the lines of, "piss off and be a pop star".

12 months later, even my dad had heard of take that.
( rachelswipe with a fork, Thu 29 May 2014, 16:02, 10 replies)

Not me, a guy my dad knows
and also he wasn't actually sacked for this, just demoted, but it's close enough for the topic so fuck it.

So, at the time of this story this chap was a corporal who had been promoted six times. I'll just give you a moment to do the maths on that one. He was on a tour in Northern Ireland (when it was rather more uppity than it is nowadays) and was assigned to guard and generally look after some officer.
The very first morning he gets woken up at 5am to be told there's an urgent thing going on, so gets ready and goes to meet his officer, whereupon he discovers that the urgent event is that said officer likes to walk his terrier at half five in the morning. Summoning all his tact and diplomacy, our hero's opinion on this is:
"You got me up at five o'clock in the fucking morning just so you could walk your fucking mangy little mutt?"

And he was on the next plane back to the mainland.
(An Inflatable Bearded Whumpus, Thu 29 May 2014, 15:46, 1 reply)

you can get sacked just for being white and english these days

( Dr. Shambolic je suis charlie, Thu 29 May 2014, 15:46, 9 replies)

A place a friend worked a few years ago had an interesting one:
A new girl started, and a couple of weeks later they all ended up down the pub on a Friday evening.

Somehow a tea-towel got involved, and silliness ensued.

Someone put it on their head (not the new girl), and one of the old hands said, amused "You look like a terrorist!"

Monday morning, the old hand was hauled into HR, and fired on the spot, because the new girl had complained.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Thu 29 May 2014, 15:23, 25 replies)

I literally just got sacked for doing no work,
because I keep refreshing this page waiting for George! to deliver a masterpiece.
(eViLegion Chief Commissioner of the Scottish Lunacy Board, Thu 29 May 2014, 15:09, 6 replies)

I've only been sacked once.
I believe that the preferred term is 'teabagging' though.
( Muns, Thu 29 May 2014, 14:40, Reply)

I worked as a despatch rider in the 1980s.
My first job was with Addison Lee, who were at the time probably the top firm of couriers in London.

My first job was to take something from an office right next to Kings cross, to another office near Great Portland street. This was a distance of roughly a mile.

I picked it up and set off. 4 hours later I called them to tell them I couldn't find great portland street. A short discussion established I was in fact in Croydon, some 15 miles south of where I was supposed to be.

They called me back into the office, and when I arrived, about 3 hours later, gave me the number of a shitty little company in old street who weren't really bothered if their riders were shit.

Can't blame them really, can I?
(username failed moderation, Thu 29 May 2014, 14:36, 8 replies)

I don't have to worry about getting sacked because I'm the boss!
I do sometimes worry about getting struck off for gross medical negligence though.
( 2 Can Chunder Word to your mums, I came to prod bums, Thu 29 May 2014, 14:19, 4 replies)

I would bet that not one person on this /qotw has ever been sacked from a job. Why? Because
I doubt one person has a real job outside of 'colouring in' for a living.
( d.r._and_quinch when will you be famous?, Thu 29 May 2014, 14:05, 9 replies)

my ball sack is unusually stretchy

( The Doveston haunted by the memory of his own amnesia, Thu 29 May 2014, 13:57, Reply)

You're sacked!
You are sacked, I'm sacking you. In fact, it's happened, it's over, it's already happened, you are a sacked man. You've been sacked. You're the subject of a sacking, I want you off these premises in 10 minutes. Knowing me, Alan Partridge, sacking you, Glenn Ponder. A-ha!
(eViLegion Chief Commissioner of the Scottish Lunacy Board, Thu 29 May 2014, 13:38, Reply)

I got sacked from my job as proofreader of b3ta urls.

( drimble he'd been white, he'd been black, Thu 29 May 2014, 13:37, 1 reply)

TURD

( MEATSNAKE Richard Hammond, Thu 29 May 2014, 13:37, Reply)

I've been sacked twice.

( The Awful Puppy Bakery is still bored, Thu 29 May 2014, 13:36, 2 replies)

First!

( The Lone Groover has mal des nuts., Thu 29 May 2014, 13:34, Reply)