A customer of mine ran a small business and used a cut-rate payroll processor. Turned out the guy was pocketing the withholding money instead of sending it to the state of New York. One morning, state authorities showed up at my customer’s shop, demanding the full amount on the spot or they’d padlock the doors. He had no idea any of it had happened.
He scrambled to get a cashier’s check and paid the taxes a second time. The payroll guy skipped town, got caught eventually, and did jail time, but I don’t think a dime was ever recovered. Imagine paying your taxes twice because the first guy decided your withholding was his retirement fund. I once had a boss who got let go so I could take his job, more or less.
I really liked the guy, and it sucked. Months later, he emailed me from his new company, asking if I wanted a position there for more money. I accepted, gave my two weeks, and made the move. It was nice to work with him again.
He was a cool dude. After about two years, our new company got acquired, and layoffs came thick and fast as they replaced our people with their own. One day, my boss and his boss, the plant manager, walked into my lab. The big man had a somber look and said, “Hey, with the acquisition, we’re having to let a lot of people go.
” I started subconsciously packing my keys into my pocket, knowing where this was heading. My old boss stood with his hands at his sides, head down, silent. The big man continued, “So, unfortunately, your boss has been let go. That means you’ll be taking on his responsibilities.
” I felt terrible for the guy. It happened twice in the time I knew him. Great dude, bad luck. I did get laid off myself months later, but I’ll always remember that moment.
While going to cooking school, I worked as a cook at a local country club, training to be a sous chef. We had a small grill downstairs with a flat top, a single fryer, and a microwave. Simple, but it had easy access to the course. It was opening day of grill season, and we had no fewer than five hundred people.
A new girl was assigned to work with me because we were slammed. Little did I know I was unknowingly training her to replace me. After a grueling twelve-hour day, my boss said, “Thanks for training your replacement. You’re fired.
” Screw you, Mort. A guy got fired at the end of his shift. No one walked him out, so he hid in a supply closet for eleven hours. He waited for the next shift to start, then approached the guy who had fired him, incorrectly assuming that man had made the decision rather than just delivered the news.
They argued, things escalated, and authorities were called. The guy fled the scene. Two ambulances showed up—one for the man who did the firing, a rough man in his late sixties who was injured in the altercation, and one for someone who tried to step in and got hurt as well. The office was wrecked.
Broken things stayed on the floor for about a week because maintenance and the cleaning crew kept pointing fingers at each other, and no one liked the guy who did the firing well enough to help him clean up. I got an email at nine p. m. on a Friday from HR saying my employment was terminated, with no explanation.
Follow-ups on Monday got me no human response either. My manager and all the executives were in the dark; they weren’t in the loop. It was purely HR. To this day I have no idea why it happened or got any closure.
I’d been at that job for years, everything was going great, my co-workers and manager loved me, and I got strong reviews and raises. Still no idea how, why, or what the hell went wrong. I worked at an ice rink once. While I was on holiday, there was a string of management changes and people got fired.
I came back and went skating, which we got to do for free. Another staff member, the son of the new managers, came over and asked, “Do you have a ticket? ” I said no. He said, “Get out.
You don’t work here anymore. ” At another rink, again while I was on holiday, they closed the place entirely and didn’t tell me, because they knew I’d raise a community stink about it. They told everyone they were shutting down for repairs when in reality they stripped the place clean of anything reusable. The wife of one of the managers made her husband tell me the night before I went away so I could at least pack up my things.
I resigned from my old company because I’d accepted a position elsewhere. I took my final in-person week as leave, and my agreed notice period came up. All I needed was to grab a few files from my laptop to finish up and hand over to my boss. Monday morning rolled around and I couldn’t log in.
I called, and they said my account had been locked because I was a leaver. They could re-enable it, but it would take a few days to go through their process—by which time I’d already be gone. Fine. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
The old place didn’t need the handover files I had for systems only I knew how to manage. I spent the rest of the week working remotely until Friday, when I handed in my laptop and pass. Then I spent the next two weeks relaxing, knowing I had a fresh start. Best holiday I ever had.
In 2008, I managed a team of eleven people spread across the country. We all came in and got laid off at eight a. m. local time in our different offices.
Then they called an all-IT meeting to announce that my team had been outsourced. A woman in one of the conference rooms in Phoenix said, “Wait, I’m on that team. ” There was a long pause. Then someone said, “Uh, could you step out into the hall, please?
HR would like to talk to you. ”
I was an on-site consultant for a pharmaceutical manufacturer that got cited by the FDA and voluntarily stopped production for a few weeks. People had nothing to do, so they played board games and held barbecues and potlucks. After a few weeks, corporate told the site director the staff could have three to four days off with pay while I planned shutdown activities.
I returned the next week to start completing them. That evening, corporate sent mass emails and texts to the entire staff, summoning them to a meeting the next day with no details. The entire staff was terminated on a video call, and only a small handful—maybe six to eight out of four hundred—were told they could stay two to three months to help decommission the place they had worked at. They called us all into the break room and handed us severance packets as we walked in.
My wife also worked there. She had the day off because it was her son’s first day at a new school, so I got to be the one to tell her. A week earlier, we had bought our first house in a new town, two hours away from our friends and family. I didn’t sleep for a week.
After that, we never worked at the same place again. Unbeknownst to us, two members of the security team had shown up an hour before and walked our location manager and regional manager out without letting them say anything to anyone. I had been there a year and a half; my wife had been there six to eight months. I had gotten her the job because it was a good place to work.
We had at least two other married couples employed there, and fewer than fifty people at our location. This was the early 2000s. I tell my kids they don’t owe an employer anything except the hours of the workday, and if something better comes along, take it, because they do not care about you. I was three weeks into a new job in the ER and had just finished my final training shift.
I worked nights. My trainer and I were called into a mandatory meeting at eight a. m. , thirty minutes after our shift ended, so we grabbed breakfast together at the café.
Neither of us was worried. I’d just gotten hired. We went to the meeting room, a huge auditorium in the hospital, and found it full of people—fifty or more. There was quiet chatter until the door shut and five people in formal business attire stood in a straight line up front with grim faces.
The room went dead silent. One of them said, “As of right now, none of you are employed by this hospital. ” More silence, and then some people started weeping. They had decided about a month prior to eliminate that position hospital-wide.
When it was my turn to talk to HR, I asked why I was even hired. They said it was a simple mistake. We were then walked off hospital property one by one by an armed security guard after our badges were confiscated. Many of the other people had worked there for decades.
It was humiliating, calloused, and degrading. I co-founded a national nonprofit. When my co-founder retired due to illness, he wanted to close it. I kept it running.
The board got replaced after a while, all corporate types in a big city across the country from our home base. I spent a decade building the organization up. One day, the new chair showed up with a couple of others—turned out one was an IT guy and one was an HR consultant. They arrived at the office not long after I opened it, gave me a big sob story about how there was no money left.
The IT guy sat there and removed my access. I had to hand over my keys. The HR lady wanted to visit my home to inspect it for company belongings. I had to hand over my phone and laptop.
Finally, they allowed me to leave, and I walked to the local McDonald’s to call my husband. I spoke to the charity’s accountant via a cheap phone I bought at a grocery store that day. There was money—plenty of it. It was a corporate takeover.
They just wanted me to move out to headquarters in the big city. It didn’t work out. They moved it all back within a year, albeit with greatly reduced public trust. Ten years of work down the drain.
I worked in IT at a major aerospace company with a facility in Southern California for five years. They merged with another company and began laying people off or moving operations to another state. On Friday, I heard about the layoffs and had access to the list of employees being let go Monday morning. I was on it.
I was the only IT person there for at least two more weeks until the merger company sent over their two IT guys, because the other IT guy who worked with me was on vacation for at least another week. He would also be laid off. They gave him a call and let him know the situation. He took a long, hard sigh and started telling me the login details for a former IT manager—call him Captain Schmuck—who had been hired up the ladder but who sometimes left his credentials lying around or changed permissions.
I knew what he was going to ask me, and I told him I couldn’t do it. I’d get caught. He said, “No, no, I was talking to myself. I’m logging into his account and I’m sending a system-wide broadcast to everyone being let go.
It has been a pleasure working with you, and thank you for the heads-up. Put me as a reference. I have something being set up for me elsewhere anyway, and I’d love to have you join me. ” To say people were upset would be an understatement.
The former IT manager was let go on Monday as well, even though he wasn’t on the list. I was fired after going on scheduled maternity leave at a large department store. It was Robinson’s-May, now Macy’s. I went in on Friday to do some final things with HR—I worked in HR.
Never again. I said my short-term goodbyes. See you in six weeks. I took a few items off my desk, like a plant and a spare pair of ballet flats, and followed up on a few outstanding things with my coworker.
Totally unescorted. Totally normal. Just taking some time off to have a baby, as one does, and then back at it soon. Come Monday, I got an overnighted FedEx letter, in all caps no less.
So professional. They were terminating my employment as of that Monday, not the prior Friday when I was actually in the office, and that their firing superseded my maternity leave. No reason given—layoff, performance, or otherwise. Calls went unanswered.
Voicemails and emails were ignored. I went to the California Department of Labor, and they basically said, “Eh, you can sue them, but they’re a big company, so good luck. ” Curiously, the company didn’t deny me unemployment. Robinson’s-May was bought out in 2005, and that store location, which was basically headquarters for the HR department, shut down.
Screw them. When I was a teenager, I got hired at a video store two blocks from my house. It would have been my first job, and I was really excited. I got a call the next day from the manager who had hired me, and he told me the store was closing immediately.
I figure he didn’t know either, since he’d just hired me the day before. Years later, I was teaching at a Montessori school in China. I’d been living in Japan and interviewed over Skype with a person who was no longer at the school when I arrived. I was recently married and had a kid, and we all moved to Shanghai because it was a better opportunity.
A month or two into the job, they realized I hadn’t fully finished my Montessori training. I only needed the official classroom hours, which I had been upfront about. They fired me and canceled my work visa anyway. The whole family had to leave quickly, and we lost a ton of money spent setting up our lives there.
Years ago, a guy was hired to modernize his department, update policy and practice, and basically right the ship. A year and a half later, his department was ahead of all the others in productivity, transparency, and communication, and the modernization project was complete. A month later, he went on his scheduled vacation, treating his family to an all-inclusive trip to Disney World. He spent weeks telling the administrative team how excited he was, how excited his family was, how the trip was only possible because of this job.
He went, came back, and was only at his desk for an hour before he was told his services were no longer needed and to clear out his desk. Apparently, the administrative team had known they were going to let him go for at least a month and let him spend all his money on a family trip, knowing he was out of a job as soon as he returned. They also had no contingency plan in place for his departure. It was one of the worst ways I’ve ever seen someone let go.
In high school, I worked at Radio Shack. Stuff had been disappearing, which I assumed was shoplifting, though I couldn’t figure out how someone would steal an entire stereo. One morning I came in, and the manager was there with another man. They asked me into the office, and my manager introduced the guy as an investigator from Tandy Corporate.
They had a lie detector set up. We waited until my co-worker arrived. When he came in and they went through the same introduction, he broke down and started crying. They didn’t have him arrested—bad press, I suppose—but he was gone.
He’d been taking merchandise out the back door and tossing it into the dumpster, then coming back at night to collect it. Someone went dumpster diving, found the stuff, and notified Radio Shack. Hilariously, his name was Rob. A couple months later, I found out he was working at a competitor, Pacific Stereo.
I wasn’t the one getting fired, but I had the uncomfortable job of cluing the person in. I worked on the IT help desk. A ticket came in from a VP saying they had trouble logging in. I knew this person, so I scooped up the ticket and called.
We started with friendly banter, then shifted into problem-solving. The VP was logged into their machine but couldn’t access a new project folder. I dug into it and saw the permissions were fine on the folder that matched this VP. I switched over to their account and found I couldn’t log in as them, which I found odd since they were.
I looked at our directory and saw their account had been disabled by my boss not long before the ticket came in. I pinged my boss, and he said they were being let go and HR was supposed to have already informed them. Apparently not. I got back on the line with the VP and said there was some kind of issue—a blatant lie—and that I was looking into it.
They joked, “What? Am I fired? ” and laughed. I had no response.
They got super quiet all of a sudden and muttered, “Oh crap,” before hanging up. I closed the ticket and copied HR with a suggestion to make sure users were informed before account suspensions were done by IT. That joke turning into silence five seconds later was brutal. We had layoffs in my old office.
They tried to be transparent and emailed everyone that a certain percentage was being cut. We had the office directory, so we could calculate that roughly sixty-plus people would go, and HR would call people into their office over two days by department. For two days, no one wanted to pick up the phone, even though we still needed it to talk to clients. In pre-Teams days, we would refresh the online directory and try to figure out who was gone, since someone was running around disconnecting people as they had their HR meetings.
Based on the names, we could tell which department was actively being laid off, and when the department shifted, that meant the rest of the previous department was safe. A friend got called in the morning. She picked up with dread, only for HR to be surprised to be talking to her. They apologized, said they called the wrong person, and hung up.
She immediately went for a walk around the block to calm down. After lunch, she got another call. This time it actually was her turn to go to HR and get laid off. I was a nanny and brought my infant son along.
I was a young mom and couldn’t afford child care, so the deal was I could watch their baby alongside my own. I was an awesome nanny and loved their child. We did age-appropriate enrichment activities and went on outings twice a week. I was never once reimbursed for gas, admission fees, or any expenses.
It wasn’t a huge deal until the parents asked me to do something out of the house daily with the babies. Out of the house meant library story times, museums, zoos, pools, playgrounds—most of which cost money. So I asked for gas and admission reimbursement. The mom said she’d have to speak with her husband.
Later that day, a friend who does occasional work on Care. com texted me that she saw my job posted. I printed it off, brought it in, and told the mom this hurt and today would be my last day. Her response was that she had to do her due diligence to find someone willing to work for that rate and expectations.
I got paid three hundred dollars a week, cash under the table. I was doing night work upgrading electrical systems at the Social Security office in Richmond, California. The job was getting close to the end. One night, the fire alarm went off and we all evacuated via the stairwell.
As we exited, one of the foremen was standing there handing out layoff checks with termination slips. Personally, I found it hilarious, because that’s just the nature of construction. Back to the union hall we go. No big deal.
But some guys were so angry they didn’t even go back for their tools. Brutal for some, funny for others. The contractor gathered up the left-behind tools and sent them to the union hall. I was asked to train someone out of the blue.
At the end of the day, the new person asked how long I had before I was leaving. I was confused and asked what he meant. He said he’d been hired to take my job. I went and asked my boss, and she said, “We didn’t want you to find out this way, but we’ve decided we pay you too much.
Can you stay until the end of the month to train your replacement? ” I walked out and got a solicitor. I sued them for unfair dismissal and won. They either had to take me back or pay me six months’ salary.
They offered me a different role at a much lower salary and terrible hours. My solicitor threatened another round of court cases. They paid the six-month salary and all my court costs. I once worked in an office that was pretty good about letting people leave early on Fridays when the weather was nice.
I never left early, so it was just me and the two office managers at about four-thirty one Friday. I got called into the head manager’s office and fired. The next Monday, my phone rang off the hook because people had come by my desk looking for me. They told no one to avoid backlash.
I had been doing my job well and was well-liked. The week before, I had caught the owner corresponding with a female scammer in the Philippines. He opened an attachment and infected our network. Also, his wife was not impressed.
They were a very religious family-owned business, and they felt it was best to get rid of me. I was one hundred percent exceeding expectations and got fired sneakily on a Friday afternoon. About fifteen years ago, I worked for Charter—Spectrum now—in one of their call centers. When people were fired, they deactivated their badges that allowed entry to the building.
So if you were fired, you had to wait for management to let you inside to get your personal belongings, and there was no way to talk to anyone about what happened. Once, about fifteen people were fired at the same time when they changed an attendance policy. It was awkward walking up to the entrance door and going in with them standing there. It was also nerve-wracking if your badge didn’t work for other reasons, because for a couple of minutes you had to think about why you might have been fired.
This happened at my company about a year and a half ago. Finance was going through reports and caught a number of people embezzling money—everything from shell corporations to airplane ticket fraud. Some of it was masterful, like the guy who created a shell company in his wife’s name and charged the company ten thousand dollars a month for signage that never went anywhere. They had apparently been doing it for years before anyone caught on.
But the worst was a guy who got fired, and then his manager got fired, and his manager’s manager got fired, all the way up until it hit a high-level VP. That was another embezzlement case, but this guy had a series of shell corporations and middlemen charging the company millions of dollars a year to basically fund his entire extended family. The reason so many people above him got fired was that they had all signed off on his expense reports without reading or questioning them. Finance and HR said, “Yep, all of you were complicit, and your ignorance cost the company millions over the years.
You’re all fired. No unemployment and no severance. You’re lucky we’re not pursuing legal action against all of you. ” After that round of firings, my boss sent out an email saying finance was on the warpath, and to make sure our expense reports were accurate and to save all receipts regardless of policy.
I ran into my manager on her commute home after work on Thursday and told her I planned to come in extra early the next day to get some work done. She started acting weird and told me it was a work-from-home day and I should just stay home. So I did. HR called me at eight a.
m. —I usually started at nine—to tell me I was terminated immediately. My laptop screen went blank, and no one on my team knew. I managed about twenty-five people, and they were all devastated.
My manager pretended to be shocked, but she absolutely knew. I’m still convinced she got rid of me because the team actually liked me and they despised her. Luckily, my whole team found new jobs. I have unfortunately not been able to land another one.
I worked armed security for all the libraries in Jefferson County, Colorado. I was approaching eighteen months on the job. Although I wasn’t in management, the owner who had hired me was always asking me to do management work—documenting employee hours for payroll, training new hires, covering shifts when people were sick or no-showed. I figured I should have been paid more, but I reassured myself that at least my job was safe since they needed me.
Yeah, right. I enjoyed a little time off while the libraries were closed over Christmas and New Year’s. When I walked into my assigned library on January second, I saw someone I had never met or trained wearing a security shirt different from mine. I had become friends with a lot of the librarians, so I asked one of them, “Hey, who’s the guy in the security shirt?
” He looked at me and said, “What do you mean? Don’t you know your company lost its contract with the county? ” A new company had underbid mine, willing to pay their employees less, which saved the county money. Not one person I worked with had any idea.
The owner who hired me was on vacation. When I reached out to ask what the hell was going on, he said, “Sorry, I didn’t have time to tell you. I’ve been on vacation and busy with my kids. ” Thanks, pal.
Do all the extra work, then find out you’re unemployed from the guy already doing your job. I worked on a computer assembly line, and we were all temp workers. They based our weekly headcount on projected orders. If they didn’t have enough orders, they let people go.
Usually it was monthly or bi-monthly, but the tally was weekly, so you never knew. If you got cut, they shut off your access card. No call, no email, no letter. You showed up to work, waved your badge, and got the red light blinking twice.
That was the end of the line. It was disheartening to show up and see a large gathering of people standing outside. More stupid than brutal. The company sent out a bunch of fifteen-minute HR meetings first thing in the morning, so everyone knew layoffs were happening.
My team didn’t get any, so we thought we were safe. But we did get an all-hands meeting invite for four p. m. that day.
The all-hands lasted ten minutes and told us more layoffs were coming, and we’d get our HR invites at six-thirty the next morning. Why couldn’t they just tell us then? We had to stew all night. Luckily—or unluckily—someone tried to log into our stock program and was locked out.
He asked around, and some people were locked out and some weren’t. So I found out I was laid off through my stock program. I hadn’t even been with the company six months, and they’d bragged during my interview about having their best year ever and a two-year runway. They eventually laid off most of the company and sold itself for parts.
Tenure isn’t a thing at community college, at least not in my state. About a week before the semester ended, HR came to meet with a colleague of mine and told him they weren’t renewing his contract. He had worked there for eighteen years. His loyalty was rewarded with a five-minute meeting right before his class, informing him he was one paycheck away from unemployment.
It had nothing to do with his performance. They decided to save money by hiring three adjunct professors to teach the same course load, since adjuncts don’t get benefits and are significantly cheaper. There’s an autistic guy I know. A senior Air Force officer was weirded out by his manner.
They couldn’t fire him because his job performance was great, so they restructured to eliminate his position and make him redundant. While that process was underway, they told his supervisor that every reference the guy got should portray him as unable to do anything but menial work. The relentless defamation destroyed his job opportunities. The whole sequence deeply affected him, and things became extremely difficult afterward.
He’s still around and kind of stable now, but he’s basically broken and will never get the real him back. One of my former trainees called out sick frequently and missed a lot of training. I warned the manager that he wasn’t a good fit, but they kept him on and pushed him into production. His first week, he called out three times.
On the third, his dad showed up to bring him lunch, and we had to explain he wasn’t there. That was the last straw. They left a voicemail telling him to call his manager and removed his biometrics so he couldn’t enter the building. He showed up the next day and had no idea why his fingerprint wasn’t working.
Someone tried to let him in, and I had to stop them and tell him to wait while I grabbed his manager. The poor guy started crying as he was escorted off site. We found out my husband lost his job when he went to the hospital and was told he didn’t have insurance at the beginning of May. He had worked for that company for twenty-two years and was highly regarded in his field.
Then he was diagnosed with several serious medical conditions last year, two of them stage four, and went on medical leave. The woman in charge of HR insisted he wasn’t responding to her requests for communication, but she sent them to email addresses he couldn’t access because his eyesight was failing. She could have texted him. My daughter or I would have responded.
She could have contacted me—I’d been his emergency contact his entire time at the company. She did neither. Terminating him cost him and us his life insurance and any medical coverage. He sadly passed away three weeks ago.
I accepted what I thought was a transfer position a thousand miles away with my current—or former—employer. My start date was April 24, 2020. On the first day of orientation, we were hit with a voluntary layoff notice. You could accept five thousand dollars and walk away.
I figured my six years of seniority would keep me safe. We had already let family rent our house back home, charging them about fifty dollars over the mortgage, on the expectation they were fixing their credit to buy it from us. So we made an offer on a house in the new state and set the closing for June first. I got a call on Friday, May twenty-ninth, telling me I would be laid off as of June first.
Apparently, my seniority didn’t transfer because it fell under a separate union contract, even though it was the same union. I called our mortgage company and gave them the news. She told me we could pretend the conversation never happened if I thought I could find another job, or she could cancel the closing. I called my family, and they said they were willing to give us our old place back.
So we canceled the closing. The company paid for a relocation and I got almost five thousand in severance, but that was all eaten up moving our entire family twenty-two hundred miles round trip, living in a hotel for two weeks, and renting a short-term apartment for three months. We moved back home with no savings, no jobs, and a very frustrated family. The good thing?
They had absolutely trashed our old house and apparently never had any intention of buying it from us. We hadn’t lived in the new state long enough to qualify for unemployment there, and because my employer treated my transfer as a voluntary separation in the home state, I wasn’t eligible there either. We had a temp worker the company had decided to let go the day before by telling the temp agency. We start at seven a.
m. , but the agency apparently doesn’t start until eight, so the guy never got the message before starting his shift. He came in, changed into the uniform in the locker room, helped us do one of the more annoying morning jobs, then went out to his car for break. When he tried to get back through the gate, his badge didn’t work.
They had processed his firing while he was on break. He found out after calling security to ask why he couldn’t get back on site. The only problem was his clothes, shoes, and other personal things were still inside the fence. He had to sit there for a while while security figured out what to do and arranged an escort to bring him back in to get his stuff and change before he could leave.
It happened to me last year. You wake up at eight-fifteen on a Monday for your nine a. m. remote shift and see a calendar invite for a meeting you’ve been told nothing about at eight-thirty.
You recognize one of the two other names from years at the same company, but you’ve never interacted with them. You Google both and find at least one is in HR, which sets off alarm bells and leaves a pit in your stomach. Even though you have seniority over eighty-five percent of the bargaining unit and should be safe from initial layoffs, you also know you haven’t done anything wrong, so it wouldn’t be disciplinary. You reach out to your union president, who hasn’t heard anything about unexpected meetings or layoffs, but she agrees it doesn’t seem like a good sign.
You join the call and see these chuckleheads staring back at you through your screen. You get the “thank you for your service to this company” speech you remember from the last time you were laid off. They reiterate three or four times that this has nothing to do with your performance, but that the company is essentially eliminating your entire role across thirty-plus sites nationwide, which is how they got around the seniority protections in your contract. Then, at the end of the call, they graciously give you the day off with pay to make up for their transgression.
You go back to bed for a couple hours before updating your resume. I found a great new job since then, but I don’t wish unemployment on anyone. So demoralizing and dehumanizing. I was hit by a car in late 2008.
People were losing jobs left and right, and I was terrified I’d lose mine if I didn’t get back to work immediately. Everyone I knew told me not to worry—my employer was a children’s hospital, my dream job, and surely they wouldn’t ditch me just for getting injured. I pressured my doctors to clear me for work, and they finally relented after about three months. I was seriously injured.
I went in to meet my supervisor and proposed a part-time arrangement with accommodations. They wouldn’t let me into the main building. They had me meet them at HR, where they told me my position was gone. I’ve never been more filled with despair in my life.
I could barely walk, so I hobbled out of there sobbing and somehow made it home in one piece. I developed whole-body flinching once I got home. The emotional impact was overwhelming—worse than when I lost my brother. I had overcome so much terrible childhood trauma just to lose it all because some uninsured idiot ran a red light.
Losing that job was devastating. I was a consultant at a major bank designing a truly crazy data project. We were a few months in and on a call with our stakeholder when suddenly all our email and access stopped working. The stakeholder was incredibly apologetic, but their entire department had just been caught doing something they shouldn’t have.
I kept in touch with two of them. They sat on their hands for eight months before they were finally let go. But yeah, we’re in a multi-hour meeting reviewing tech docs, and we’re all suddenly like, “Was there something you wanted to tell us? ”
We hired a travel tech for a thirteen-week healthcare contract—not nursing.
It turned out he was submitting hours he wasn’t actually working. My boss would give him a sheet with his actual hours, and he would send his agency a doctored copy. My boss would get the forms back from the agency to verify and noticed discrepancies. She gave him the benefit of the doubt, figured it was a clerical error, and made inquiries.
After the agency did some research and compared what she gave him to what he gave them, it turned out he was scamming both the organization and the agency. He claimed he worked days he didn’t. There was a week he returned home for a family emergency and submitted hours anyway. He said he worked twelve-hour shifts, which we don’t do.
One day the agency called him and started asking questions. He told one of my co-workers he had to take the call and would be back, but he never came back. He emptied his locker, left his badge, and skipped town. Brutal for him because he’d been caught.
Brutal for us because we needed the help. I work at an Amazon warehouse. When I first started, I knew I’d probably get let go eventually, but I didn’t know when. One night at the end of my shift, I went to scan my badge at the turnstile, and it beeped red and wouldn’t open.
I went to security, and they said, “Was today your last day? ” I replied, “If it was, nobody told me. ” They said, “Yeah, it was your last day. ” Then they took my badge, threw it in the trash, and let me out through the security door.
I got the official message about being let go about twelve hours later. But immediately after security let me out, I checked the Amazon app we use for schedules, and it wouldn’t let me log in. That’s how I found out I was gone. Granted, they hired me back three months later, and I’ve been here six years now, but still.
I also heard that at a different warehouse, a bunch of people couldn’t clock back in from lunch, and that’s how they found out. I can’t confirm that, but I can confirm that a friend who worked at a different Amazon nearby drove to work one day, got his badge scanned, and that’s how he found out he’d been let go. I worked at a bank as an assistant manager, mid-twenties at the time. I thought things were going well.
Corporate was changing things, so we had to start pushing sales harder. My manager was dealing with health issues and asked me to implement the changes. The older ladies on staff didn’t like it, so I think they complained to her. I was at work and saw someone sitting in the lobby.
I walked up and said, “Hi, can I help you with something? ” They replied, “I’m just waiting on so-and-so. ” I let that person know someone was waiting for them while I got back on the phone to make calls about loans. A few minutes later, I was pulled into a conference room—one people had to walk through to reach the break room.
I found out the person I had greeted earlier was from HR, someone who had driven an hour and a half to fire me because my boss couldn’t look me in the eye and do it herself, even though she had orchestrated the whole thing. I went back to my desk, packed up, and counted down my drawer. They watched me like a hawk. My manager carried my box of belongings out the door for me because I had a broken ankle and was in a cast.
As soon as the door closed behind us, she just handed me the box. Maybe more sad than brutal. I got hospitalized in March of 2025 for several months and underwent extensive treatment, multiple procedures, and a long recovery. I nearly lost my life more times than I have fingers and toes.
I worked at a small company—just me, one co-worker, and one boss. My boss hired two people and had his son help cover for me while I was on sick leave. After I got out of the hospital, I visited the workplace for lunch now and then. They always said they missed me and couldn’t wait for me to come back, and that I had a spot because I was a key role.
Every time we met, I told them the doctors thought I’d be strong enough after the new year to start at twenty-five percent and work my way up to one hundred percent within three to four months. Early December came, and I talked to my doctor. We agreed to go as planned, with me starting in January. I called my boss that same day, and he said, “I don’t think we have room for you in the company anymore.
You should have given me better notice that you were coming back. ” A few days later, he said, “I’m going to fire you. ” My co-worker was devastated and couldn’t understand it. They had lost so many clients after I got sick, and everything was a mess.
I probably should have taken it to court, but I didn’t have the energy. I got four months plus my vacation days paid out. I also heard from a couple of different sources that the company had serious money problems. My dad’s company got bought by another one, and he knew from the moment it happened that they would work on replacing him.
He was the promotions director at a radio station, basically second in command, with an office right next to the owner. He handled scheduling for literally every event, promotion, and whoever worked it. Not only did he know he was going to be replaced the moment the buyout happened, but he also had to watch the new people actively manage the place like crap while he onboarded and trained his own replacements. The only reason he stayed instead of quitting was that he was going to make them pay him for as long as he could, make sure he qualified for unemployment, and refuse to fix the mistakes his replacement kept making.
He let the problems pile up—overlapping events, workers expected to be in two places at once. It was sad. He loved his job. He had to watch everyone he worked with get fired and replaced with worse employees, and be the last one out.
He left a place he had built the foundation of his current life on, and it had become a ghost of its former self due to the buyout. Brutal might be surprising to some, but a slow, crushing inevitability like that felt even more brutal to me.