A time you’ve got in trouble at work which was incredibly justified

I got a bollocking for a possible data breach (well, I think it was a data breach).

I had a whole day of home visits, all 8-12 miles from the office. One client wasn't in, and the next one couldn't see me earlier than the appointed time, so I had an hour or so to kill. I popped into a cafe, got a coffee and tucked myself into a corner, got my laptop out and caught up on updating clients' contact sessions.

I was so engrossed that I didn't notice someone sit at the table diagonally behind mine. The next day, I got summoned into a private room and asked why I was sitting somewhere public, with client records open where someone could see what was on my laptop screen well enough to read the names and addresses. The person who'd seen me phoned the office and reported it, and gave the details of 2 of the client records they'd seen, management had checked the database and seen that I'd added entries at the relevant time.

All I can say is that that person must have phenomenal eyesight to read 10 point text from about 8 feet away, and on the other side of the cafe, and that I'm utterly mystified as to how they knew who to contact. I didn't have any visible ID with the organisation's name on and there's no logo or anything on the database.

Not me but when I was first going out with DH (teens) we were both at uni / college. He worked in a clothes store that's quite popular on me cough white stuff cough

We shagged in the changing rooms on one quiet weekday evening.

Manager caught us just after the act.

He didn't even get the sack, he got a very awkward warning.

Still together happily 10+ years later and married.

We've done it in quite a few strange places (cos horny, not cos that's what we're into) but white stuff changing rooms (pardon the pun..) was one of the funnest.

Worst thing I did was pretend to be sick so I could go to the cinema. In my defence it was The Mummy Returns with the yummy Brendan Frasier. But that was the final straw and I was put on a disciplinary as I'd already taken quite a few sick days. Most of them were genuine.
To be fair to them, I was lazy and unmotivated sat on my till at Sainsbo's all day. Kept getting told off for leaving my till at the end of my shift. I'd put the security lock on it and everything but I was told I HAD to wait for the manager to do it. The manager who was never there so you'd always end up staying on past your finish even if it was dead. I figured they owed me the odd day here and there when you added up how much time I ended up working for free. They didn't see it that way, funnily enough.
I also worked out that if you pressed three particular buttons on the till in the right order, the till would crash and take ages to boot back up. I am very surprised they didn't spot how frequently this happened near the end of my shift.
I may have dramatically quit in floods of tears when the manager accused me of being rude to a customer. I actually had been rude to a customer a few months before so it was a puzzle it took so long to confront me about it. I denied it and then they bought up the time I'd bunked off two hours early. That day I had assumed I was on an eight hour shift as usual, not realising the rota had been altered and I had a longer shift.
I may have told them to stuff their stupid job.

Looking back, I was an awful employee, but from my point of view it was a shit job for terrible pay and I regularly had customers having a go at me because the store was out of something. As if a cashier on minimum wage has any control over how many boxes of digestive biscuits are ordered.

I spent my last day at one particular job recreating paper models of bridges. The level of detail and skill shown was not only impressive but astounding. Quite a few people commented that If only I had made that much effort in the job itself….
I wasn’t allowed to burn my bridges in the pub later as it was the basement and a fire hazard.

Yep, when I threw up over my boss's desk after I was plied with drinks by colleagues at lunchtime on my 21st birthday. (That was after I'd thrown up in a waste bin and all over the stairs!).

@BadBadDecisions Ah not the same person then. Maybe before or after my time.

Took my work phone abroad and let the kids watch YouTube. Bill was about £1000 😬 boss just said ‘remember to turn off roaming when you go abroad’ company went bust shortly afterward…

I think it was maybe Craig @NameChangeAsItsOuting

I worked for architects when I was younger. One of my colleagues offered to make a curry from scratch during our lunch hour. She was older than me. Anyway we ate our curry and it was great. Later in the afternoon one of the architects went ballistic because the office smelt like a curry house and he had a meeting with clients!

@BadBadDecisions Sounds like we worked for the same company. I didn't stay long and when I told the boss I was leaving he just went "right..." and turned puce but didn't say anything further. He'd had a warning from HR as he bullied people so much that there was a crazy high turnover. Wonder if it's the same same person!

Manager came in early and caught me and boyfriend in a compromising position 😂got a stern telling off and forwarded the company policy on relationships at work! This was before the working day started but don't think that made it better

Haha that's brilliant!

Dundee is clearly a hotbed of vengeful fucked over employees.

I also worked at the local paper for a while. It was awful cliquey bollocks. When I handed my notice in the boss said 'I'll make sure you never work in this town again' 😆 to which I said....well I've already got another job so...see ya!

Ooh I see my home town has been mentioned! Hello former Tesco customer service employees!
I didn't work there but at one of the local papers.
We had a tyrannical boss whose ambition seemed to be to make the local paper a mini version of the Sun. Everyone hated him as he was a bully.
When social media first got big, he got quite obsessed with it and would scour Twitter and Facebook for information about incidents in the city.
Any sign of police/fire/ambulance being in a location, he'd make the reporters phone the emergency services control room to ask about it and then send them out to scour the scene. Literally ambulance chasing.
Every morning he'd have a long list of these potential "incidents", with really vague details like "there were 2 police cars spotted in (name of large neighbourhood).
Then he'd make us phone the control room and go through every single one of them, while the sergeant on the other end of the phone got more and more irate for wasting his time.
Then we'd have to drive around some estate on a wild goose chase for an "incident" that may or may not have happened.
This wasted hours of our morning, then we'd get bollocked when we didn't have time to finish our other work.
Nothing would persuade bully boss to change his tactics, we were just told we needed to "manage our time better".
So, in an act of rebellion we started making fake social media accounts and posting juicy snippets about "incidents" in the city (all made up). Then we'd flag them up to bully boss, who'd get all excited. Of course the control rooms would have no information, so boss would send us to check it out.
We'd drive to McDonalds or Starbucks and chill for a bit before heading back and giving boss some tantalising details we'd "found out", but never enough to be able to publish a story. Of course the press offices had no information either. Bully boss would get more and more worked up, then he'd have a bust up with the press office and accuse them of "withholding information in the public interest". The press officers were dicks too, so we didn't feel too bad for them.
We never got found out as we were careful not to do it too often, but it was satisfying while it lasted.

After a drunken night out we also prank called a high profile politician who'd been involved in a scandal. We left a voicemail message that consisted of a "song" we'd made up about said scandal. We had the real fear the next morning but amazingly he didn't complain and it was never mentioned again.

I suspect that’s very industry specific. I’ve only worked at one place where I had to fill in a form (military - there’s a form for everything) and even there HR wasn’t involved. Outside of that I’ve never worked anywhere where leave requests were managed as formally as you’re suggesting. In general I’ve always been able to just say I won’t be in and make sure my leave days add up correctly if there’s a tracking system for that.

Not me, as I've never had a proper job, and the two improper jobs I have had, what I was doing was far less awful than what the employer was doing...

My housemate working in a call centre... lost his rag with a customer who was saying some vile things, absolutely vile. Eventually in response to the expletive laden verbal abuse he says...

'Oooh keep going you're really turning me on I fucking love it'...

They hung up and called back, spoke to a manager. He was back home within the hour, suspended pending investigation.

The lucky LUCKY bastard ... after a month off, on full pay, they lost the recording of the call and he went back to work (And later did receive a promotion!).

This was a close run thing rather than actually getting in trouble. As a student in the summer I worked in a cafe by the beach belonging to a holiday park. Early 00s. Think burgers, chips, some very basic sandwiches, pre-packaged ice creams, nothing very fancy. We were part of the wider holiday park catering team but the level of supervision was minimal, and the supervisors we did have were around the same age as us - late teenage or early twenties. All on minimum wage and minimum effort. At one point a scheme was concocted where the kitchen assistant brought in big trays of eggs from a local market, and we started offering "off-menu" egg and bacon rolls, using the bacon we were meant to put in burgers. Once the egg costs were paid off the money was put in a pot and went towards our end of summer party.

I don't think I appreciated at the time that we were undercutting our employer and they'd have been well within their rights to sack the lot of us.

This is genius in its simplicity 😂

This thread is really fantastic!! Personal highlights for me;
Brother squashed into tiny girls coat, looks like perv
Shoe stretching machine a faff, shove own bigger feet in their shoes instead
YOU TAKE THE FUCKING CALL
’Don’t go checking on hamsters’ being universally understood in an anonymous office

It was before the days of GDPR, but I got a lot of very hard stares from all directions.

I can only aspire to levels of pettiness where I name an email folder “poo”. 😂😂😂 you are my hero @garlictwist

I was sending 60000 HKD to an account. (Approximately £6k)Turns out I had it in GBP, so I sent £60000 instead. Now I was so ready for the justification of my beheading. However, my checker got fired. I felt awful and even asked to be fired instead.

I didn't like my boss so as a mini act of defiance I used to save emails from her in a folder I called "poo". I didn't realise that she could see this if she logged in to the system as me and she was not amused.

What relevance is that? Weird

Started a new job and took my lunch hour every day, until someone asked me if I was part time. Turn out it’s 30 mins lunch and not an hour so I was getting 2.5 hours extra a week 🙃

ooops!