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

[PinkMoscatoLover]

I was just thinking about the time when I started a new job in 2020. It was office based and we’d always have the radio playing in the background whilst working.

We’d listen to Heart, KISS or Capital FM and these stations would ALWAYS have some sort of competition going on. ‘Text us if you hear X song to win 30 grand,’ those sorts of competitions. Whenever I’d hear the specific song, I’d pick up my work phone and text the number in hope to win.

I was doing this daily for about 3/4 weeks when I received an email from someone relatively high up in the company. They’d sent me a spreadsheet of everytime I texted this number and how much each text cost. I racked up £98.56 or some nonsense like that😅

Luckily I only received a warning and was told not to do this again. They also highlighted that my work phone was to be used for WORK purposes only. Unofficially, my manager told me that the only reason I had kept my job is because I was ‘bloody good at it’ and reminded me to not be so stupid again.

Have you ever got in trouble for something at work and you totally deserved the bollocking?

When we first got computers and email at work (I’m very old) I was mucking about with a colleague figuring out how it all worked. I got a picture from somewhere of a donkey and emailed it to colleague saying “here’s a picture of big boss” I put big bosses name in the subject line. Except it wasn’t the subject line. It was the CC line. He was not amused.

Spending too much time on my personal email account. My boss wasn't snoopong but was sat next to me, i was young and inexperienced and didn't realise how obvious it was. It was before people routinely had their emails on their phones and in that brief window when lots of employers were blocking social media & monitoring staff using internet etc.

He was kind about it, told me it was fine to be checking at lunch etc but it seemed to be too often, and dealt with it the right way - realised i could handle harder (and more interesting) work rather than my attention drifting out of boredom.

Worked in a really trendy shoe shop whilst at college. When new lines of shoes came in that we wanted, myself and a couple of other sales assistants would hide the pairs in our sizes until we could afford to buy them so they wouldn’t sell out!

All fine until our supervisor did a huge audit and things didn’t add up - we had to own up and hand over our stash…

Well I've rucked up today and am fully expecting my P45 when I go in tomorrow.

I miss working on magazines when you could come in the day after events, parties, etc, still shitfaced and no one batted an eye. I used to come in to show face, then go downstairs to the Mexican place, get an extra spicy burrito and take it to the sick bay and have a nice lie down under a blanket, dozing with the burrito right by my face so I could sleep nibble. Then come back to my desk around midday, refreshed, work until 1pm, then take my lunch break. Quite often there’d be a hair of the dog Prosecco opportunity around 3pm for someone’s birthday/work anniversary/leaving do.

My grad training scheme was like this. One time we'd come in with awful hangovers, my friend had shagged one of our colleagues and regretted it & i had to duck out of a team training session to chuck up in the loos. Late morning there was a fire alarm and 4 of us just went straight to the pub over the road for a pint. We' been there 2 mins and a group of 3 really senior people walked in behind us and pretended we weren't there.

One guy once was too drunk to get home, we'd all been drinking in a bar near work. Two of the other blokes helped him back to the office and basically put him to bed under his own desk. When we got in the next morning at 9am he was still there and the team leader was debating whether to wake him up and bollock him.

I used to work in a upmarket toiletries shop. We were so so so quiet - I remember the day our entire sales sheet for that day was a single £7.50 lipgloss. Anyway; there was a McDonald’s over the road. On days I was working alone, I used to just pop over for a coffee and an apple pie without bothering to lock up or close anything. One time I was over there and met my boss in the queue. We stared at each other in silence. My order was called before hers and I took it and went back to the shop. She met me there 30 seconds later and gave me the bollocking of my life 😂

I did similar with opening store cards, except we already offered 10% off but I was giving them an extra 20% off from another promotion. In that case it was kind of unofficially approved by the dept manager as she wanted her bonus for meeting card sign up targets - and nobody higher up queried it as far as I know, presumably because it made the store look good.

I worked as an accounts manager years ago and I had a customer ring me and go mental to me about our company and the service they weren’t getting and they got really irate despite me trying to diffuse the situation but honestly they were absolutely awful to me

They then insisted on speaking to my director so I popped them on hold ready to transfer and I then decided whilst they were on hold to call them a cunt, a fucking idiot and possibly a wanker too, Only they weren’t on hold like I thought they were, my director wasn’t amused and neither was the customer, god knows how I didn’t get fired 😆

Got bollocked for claiming for hours I didn’t work as a teenager. Only got away with it because all the managers were fiddling the rotas to give us double pay to cover their shifts so it hadn’t been my idea. They’d only pulled me up on it because they wanted to get rid of one particular manager. Plus they would’ve had to sack most of their staff which would have been a pain in the arse.

They should’ve sacked me for all the wildly inappropriate at-work shagging and having ‘lock ins’ after hours but they didn’t know about that.

Haha I'm surprised more people didn't do it but clearly they didn't because I won the award for most store cards opened in the North, despite only working weekends 😅

Nooooo🫣🫣🫣

I made my sickness Notes disappear so they couldn't get rid of me for sickness in university.

I was once the recipient of a transferred call where the person transferring had been less than flattering about the person being transferred and it was overheard. Thankfully, I had just responded by saying 'uh huh' etc. while noting down the details of what they wanted to talk about. The person came through to me and announced 'I heard all that'. That was a fun call for me, not!

My first job as a teenager, slept in on my first day (on purpose), they phoned up and sacked me on the spot. I don’t blame them, who wants to employ a 16 yr old who is too lazy to turn up.
The job I got instead was much better and involved free bags of crisps.

I was about 23 and working in the library of a quite prestigious London uni. A lot of internal politics and some senior leadership worshipped the dean, but within the lower ranks there was a lot of grumbling about him. I used to hang out with all the IT and maintenance guys (actually ended up marrying one of those IT guys and DH was there when I did this thing - joy!) We’d just had our Christmas party a few nights before and it was the last work day before Christmas. A load of us were in the pub next door including some of the more serious senior leadership. Someone had a laptop showing the photos of the Christmas party and a pic of the dean came up. For some unknown reason (I didn’t even have especially strong feelings about him either way) I decided to stick two fingers up at his pic, double barrels with both hands. There was an audible gasp around the table and one particular senior leader who was especially Ms Trunchbull-like told me I would be disciplined in the new year.

I spent the whole Christmas shitting myself that I would be sacked but in the end, my manager (who didn’t think it was a big deal) just quietly dealt with it for me. And to be honest when it happened, I remember talking to my now DH and he was laughing about it so hard and saying how he’d never met anyone like me before, and I secretly kind of knew he was really into me - so that ended up being a very good thing!

Racked my brains for legitimate reasons - but I must have gotten away with everything I’ve done and I fuck around a lot!

only two tellings off I can recall were not my fault but a bitch at work who was a jumped up PA and thought she was everyone’s boss.

1st accused me of trying to tamper with the signing in book as if I was trying to get extra money (this was in front of the whole office staff btw) - I hadn’t done it, and could show her how she was wrong that it had happened on everyone’s.

2nd I got literally pulled into her office the day after our French owning company had came in for a visit, so she could tell me I had been dressed inappropriately. I was confused as I always dressed smartly, she went onto explain that my top had ridden up at the back and exposed a little skin on my back as I was lent over the copier…more outrageous was she always wore low cut tops to show off her only redeeming feature 🤭

I really hate mine as it was so embarrassing.

I worked in an unsupervised team doing the crappy weekend shift when I was younger, and the manager had her son who was a couple years younger than me (young adult though not underage teen to be clear) come work there too, and we ended up doing loads of shifts together over many months. The manager was a real scary woman who you didn’t want to mess with. She idolised her son as he was a very good looking popular (arrogant) lad.

He was one of those big headed guys who you weren’t sure if he was flirting with you or just being a dick and we used to play loads of idiotic pranks on each other, usually with food. One day it got completely out of hand we shagged at work in a cupboard after my shift ended.

I will never know how his mother - my manager - actually found out but I think he boasted about it to someone. She turned up one weekend on a shift unexpectedly and didn’t confront me immediately, she waited right till the end of my shift, looked me dead in the eye and told me to to home right away and stop having sex with her son.

I was 18 and had a part time job in Superdrug. I was on and evening shift after college and me and my friend went out at lunchtime and got pissed as farts. I turned up to my shift legless. Luckily the assistant manager hid me from the manager and put me on shelf stacking not tills. Worst shift ever, hangover kicked in half way through!

Omg we used to do this when I was a supervisor in River Island😂

We also had a sale cage where all of our sale items were. We had things going back years that was still in there. Myself and the assistant store manager would go in the sale cage (it was locked and only three of us had keys) and mark down items that we wanted to buy which were already marked down.

There was this really nice lace crop top that was originally £20 marked down to £16 then marked down to £12. I marked it down to about £4 something and still got 20% off on top. Fucking bargain. We never got caught though some things were about 5 years old so the prices that we marked didn’t stand out

Free bags of crisps? Sign me up!

I submitted an expenses claim for a client dinner where the cost of the champagne was double the cost of the food. It was something like £1k, with food £300 and champagne £600. It was within my expenses limit but obviously not a good look. I’d not appreciated I’d need to submit the fully itemised receipt along with my expenses claim, with the nights debauchery laid bare for everyone to see.

My very lovely boss gave me a proper bollocking, but what upset me the most was when he told me how disappointed he was in me. That cut like a knife (and I’ve never done it since!)

Not me but I was reminded by all the phone bill ones.

Maybe twelve years years ago I was temping essentially on a big IT project. Think brand new building, with all new IT for a sort of new business all being done by a well known contractor. So IT set up and run by the company I was temping for on behalf of this shiny newish business

There came a point when all the pre existing mobile numbers associated with sort of new business transferred to us to be managed from that point forward. Mostly key personnel- directors, some senior staff.

10 days later I got a call from the mobile coverage provider to ask if one of the phones had been stolen. Someone had racked up a four figure bill in that time. It transpired that many many movies had been watched while this person travelled for work.

Emailed a spreadsheet with the salaries of everyone in the department to...everyone in the department.

We were all in the military and worked in operating theatres a theatre nurses or ODPs. On night shifts if we got bored we would do Sux Runs. There would be a gang of you and you would pair up and give your mate Suxamethonium which is used to paralyse your muscles during intubation. You would then have races to see how far you could get before you collapsed. The stupidity and level of trust were on equal measure as if your friends were bad at their job you would have died as you needed them to maintain your airway! We got in trouble but not as much as you would expect. They were more worried about the CCTV footage being found 😂.

Was you my boss