19 People Reveal How They Turned The Tables And Got Their Bosses Fired
Article created by: Mantas Kačerauskas
We often hear stories about people messing up at their workplace so much that they get fired. Some of them couldn’t care less about getting firedsome claim it’s the best thing that happened to themand others, they witnessed their new colleague saying “hasta la vista” on their very first day at work. So, yep, every getting fired story is unique.
But this time, we are turning tables and diving into the seemingly rare instances of bosses getting fired. Ask ‘how?’ and you’ll hear thousands of different reasons why that happens. Today, we selected some of the most interesting and unusual stories that scream ‘sweet justice’ for you to read below.
Also, if you ever had your boss, manager or supervisor go for whatever reason, share your story in the comment section!
The CEO publicly praised me for completing a task that my boss had struggled with, so my boss retaliated by forwarding all of his tasks to me in an effort to overwhelm me with work. I actually found his job pretty manageable, which the CEO also noticed and fired him, giving me his job and office.
I had a boss who refused to make accommodations for a disabled coworker. Refused to keep other staff in line and basically let the disabled worker fall behind and get picked on because she (the boss) felt like she was not required to do anything else. I work for a local government agency and reported it to our HR and upper management. After they did nothing, I contacted them again to let them know I would be filing a suit with the ACLU for ADA violations.
My boss was gone in two weeks and the rest of the staff had mandatory ADA trainings.
Not my story but my mothers, I watched on the side lines as a Teenager. My mothers job was basically a professional fundraiser (I really don’t know what else to call it). People came to her for help raise money for nonprofits or other foundations that needed it. This was a long time ago before Social workers were more of a mandatory thing at high schools, my highschool was very poor and did not have one. So my mother took it upon herself to set up a fundraiser to pay the salary of a Social Worker so my highschool could have one.
After Raising all the money she went to talk to the Principal who flat out refused to take any of it and said the position just wasn’t necessary. My mother was pretty upset and just decided she would donate the money to supplies or something like that. (I honestly have no idea what she did with it, but it did go to some sort of charity.) After a few months, at a Christmas party the Superintendent of all the public schools in the area was at the same party and he struck up a conversation with my mother, after some small talk my mother said that it was such a shame that Principal didn’t take the money for the Social Workers position. The superintendent was dumb struck and then told her that he had ordered Principal to find funding for that position and when Superintendent asked him about it he replied with, “no one is interested in that and we just couldn’t get the money for it.”
Needless to say he lost his position and whenever we came back from the Holiday break the school was hiring for his position.
I was an intern at a tech company and in a one-on-one/mentorship meeting my boss asked me what skillset I wanted to pursue in the future. I said that I wanted to do backend work (this was a programming internship). He replied and said “Girls aren’t smart enough for that type of work, how about we put you on the QA path, you’ll do better there”. At the time I was so stunned that I just repeated quietly that I wanted to do backend work, the meeting awkwardly ended after that. I always thought that I would be courageous in the face of blatant sexism if it ever happened to me but, instead, I was silent because I was a 23 year-old who really needed that internship to turn into a real job.
Fast forward a couple weeks and I was out to lunch with a few co-workers who brought along a lady who had worked at the company for years. She’d been out on contract for a while so I hadn’t met her yet. Everyone was talking about the boss and some of the stuff he had done or said to them, mostly just rude things, so I took a chance and mentioned what happened in that meeting. She said she’d take care of it. Within a few days he was fired by the big boss. I went on my first contract doing backend work about a month later and I loved it 🙂
As I understand it I was not the first person to have serious complaints about him, just the last person.
One summer I volunteered to help a conservation society in East Africa. The aim of the project was to educate the local rural population about poaching and to get them to help us stop it from the ground up.
Anyway, I was staying with the lead ranger and his family and on numerous occasions he served us meat that I’m 100% sure was poached. He tried to tell me that it was pork, but it was dark and gamey with lots of small bones. I think that it was small antelope like dikdik or duiker.
When I returned to Nairobi I mentioned to my grandpa (his boss’s boss) that we’d eaten some odd meals. He investigated, and found out that my boss had a poacher friend who was selling him illegal meat. He was fired, I didn’t feel guilty. Poaching is awful.
He grabbed the back of my neck and said “If you ever say I’m wrong in front of a customer again I will beat your ass.”
I went to the GM and told him and my supervisor was relieved of his duties about 5 minutes later.
My manager wanted to prove I’m slacking off so he could write me up. So he watched CCTV footages then wrote, printed out and SIGNED a detailed 17 pages worth of Word document what did I do in the past two days. With timestamps (like, 07:59 arriving, 08:01 speaking with co-worker A and B, 08:07 sitting down to my desk, etc.). He told me that he’s not happy with my work ethics if I won’t improve my efficiency, I’m fored. . I took the papers and showed to his boss and told her that I’m not happy with my managers work ethics and his efficiency might be better if he wouldn’t watch 17 hours of CCTV footages to spy on an employee. She was terrified (it would’ve been a rock solid lawsuit for me – but I love my job) and we had to search for a new manager. Also, my salary raised.
Phoned him to tell him I won’t be at work for the rest of the week as my mum is terminally ill in hospital.
The next day (about an hour after she passed away) he phoned and asked why I wasn’t at work, I just hung up on him so I wouldn’t say anything that would get me in trouble.
The next day I sent the area-manager a Whatsap message explaining what he’d be done and attached a video of him breaking the freezer door while having a tantrum which cost the store nearly £5000 in lost stock and the repair costs (which he’d told the AM it broke on its own). He got fired that day and I got 2 weeks off with full pay
In college I worked in a take-out restaurant just off campus, and we were all employed by the school. I was 17-18 years old (back in 2007/2008) and my boss, the manager, was a 40-something creeper. Hitting on me, touching me inappropriately (trying to massage my shoulders, tickling me, putting his hands on/around my waist) despite me asking him to stop. Then he friended me on Facebook, I declined, and suddenly my work schedule was changed. I was on shift during hours when I had class, and when I explained that problem, I got taken off the schedule altogether.
I told the assistant manager what was going on (which I was explicitly told by the manager not to talk to the assistant) and he reported what was going on to upper management– boom, manager was fired. I worried for a while if he was going to come after me for that.
I got my boss disbarred. He was an attorney who was a serial sexual abuser of female clients/criminal defendants. He got away with it for over twenty years and preyed upon at least twelve different victims. The Office of Attorney Regulation censured him multiple times for other offenses, like being late to pay his annual bar fees, but even though they knew about at least five of the victims, they wouldn’t disbar him.
I discovered that the Office of Attorney Regulation decides whether to “pursue an action” against an attorney based on a cost/benefit analysis. I gathered as much documentation of everything as I could, over a six month period.
I used math to prove to their superior how severely my boss had underestimated turnover 3+ years in a row, costing a ton of money and labor issues. One day earlier the boss had screamed at my team until his face went purple, making a huge spectacle in front of the entire floor. The gist was that we were colluding against the company by (a handful of us) electing not to renew our contracts. Came back with graphs and maths, baby. He was demoted and transferred out a couple weeks later.
Pro-tip: don’t make a grumpy scapegoat out of someone who loves to make excel graphs.
Worked at a McDonald’s in highschool at 17. I was being sexually harassed by a co-worker twice my age. He said some really awful stuff to me that made me afraid to come to work. They refused to switch my shifts. They also were working me too much for being under 18 and tried to get me to sign a consent form saying I knew I’d be working the hours I was, when I constantly asked for different hours.
I called the corporate offices and told them. My parents even got a lawyer involved. I quit and a few weeks later a coworker I went to school with said two of the shift managers, the supervisor, and the store manager were all terminated and barred from working with the company again. They brought in a few temporary people who were high up and ended up sniffing out the other bad employees.
I had a job that required my supervisor to be doing evaluations of my cases and charts. She just hadn’t, in months. She and my director ordered me and my co-workers to do our own chart audits, fill out the forms, and they would sign off. I was so tired of not having adequate supervision, staff meetings weekly where she yelled at us and invariably someone cried due to the stress and lack of support, and not having been paid enough to do everything I was doing AND their job, I refused. I was told to do it or I would be fired. Nope. So I got fired.
On the way out to my car, I called my former director who had moved to another agency. She set up an interview for the next day and I had a new job within 24 hours. She asked me what had happened at that interview. I spilled all the tea. Her sister-in-law was on the board of the previous agency, so she called her and I told her everything, too. Director was fired and supervisor was reprimanded and put on close monitoring. She had killed any chance of promotion and left shortly afterwards, I heard. I was just happy to have jumped ship from that toxic mess. I should have left months earlier.
I had a boss who was skimming off employee hours at Walmart. I took screenshots of my employees hours on Thursday before the shift started and then screenshots of their hours on Friday that showed that all of them had a couple hours skimmed off their work week. I was a low level manager- he was an upper tier manager.
He got fired.
I believe his motivations was that he wanted to get promoted and wanted to show that he could get more done in less man hours. Probably would have impacted his bonus too.
I used to work at a title company and witnessed our department manager forge mortgage documents on a fairly regular basis. So when she went to upper management to throw the entire department under the bus for being behind on recording documents, I marched straight to HR to resign and let them know what she was doing.
She was fired and they called me and offered my job back before the week was out.
Our manager spent her whole shift in the office watching us on camera and if we so much as stopped to talk to each other she’d come out and yell at us to get back to work. She was completely immature. One time I left my water bottle at the front counter and my co worker had to stop her from purposefully throwing it away. She would make up rules on the spot if she didn’t like something someone did. I could go on. She was a terrible, unfriendly, hypocritical, mean manager.
Honestly, we all just went to the owners and told them everything and how it made us feel. They got HR involved and got her fired and found out she may have been stealing or giving away product. It was such a relief. If you work for a small business, just be honest with the owners if management isn’t family.
He was always slacking off; he’d go and do a 15 minute task, and be gone 2 hours. He’d have to ‘shoot off early’ for a doctors appointment, or a dentist appointment, always with no prior warning and whenever he was obviously bored. This was, mind you, within weeks of the new shop opening & all of us being hired.
I was young and went along with it for a while, my colleague was in her 40s and vaguely knew him anyway, so was not standing for it. She reported him repeatedly to our area manager, who decided to come down to speak to him about it.
AM rung in the morning, told him to stay in the shop today, and send one of us out for anything that needed doing. He said he had something to do, but his boss said nope, need you in the shop. Somehow he didn’t get the obvious message and went out anyway, the AM came down and he was gone; my manager wouldn’t answer his phone all day, AM was PISSED.
At the end of the day when we were closing up, he walked past, posted his keys through the door, and I never saw him again. Didn’t even attempt to argue his case.
Was the head chef of a small restaurant that I eventually owned ( before my life collapsed, but thats another story). The owner ( who was rarely there) suspected the general manager of stealing. On quiet nights if she thought she wasn’t asking enough on tips ( place was small enough that on slow nights it was just the two of us working) she would go to the computer from the managers screen and delete any tables that were paid in cash, pocketing the money. I got suspicious when my food cost numbers would just never add up to what was being sold. So I got ahold of the software company that ran our computer system, and it turns out they have a backdoor that even the management can’t see that logs every single key stroke. Turns out she had ripped off close to $20000 over a 6 month period. She was asked to leave after that but for some reason the owner didn’t bother to press charges.
By doing so much it started an investigation into what they were actually doing during their day. Officially she was fired for sending nudes through corporate email, but the only reason they were tracking her email was to understand what she was spending her time on. Turns out it was an affair.
