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?

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.

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.

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.

either the time I sent nearly half a million pounds of my client’s money to a bank account that didn’t exist (I’d swapped two numbers over on the slip of paper authorising accounts to send it). It took nearly a week for the Abbey National to return it. I don’t know how I wasn’t sacked.

or the time I buggered off on a long lunch break on a Friday forgetting to ‘release keys’ this leaving the whole chain sat around in moving vans waiting for me to get back. It was pre mobile phones so there was no way for anyone to contact me until I swanned back in later.

you will all be pleased to know that I didn’t take a job as a conveyancing assistant again and your future house purchases are safe from my incompetence!!

When I was 16 I went to work drunk, thinking I could hide it, I couldn't I got sent home. Didn't lose my job though

Someone at my dh work was caught phoning sex lines when everyone had gone home. He didn’t get the sack, but was told to stop (obviously!) and to pay the huge bill.

One of my colleagues told us all down at the pub that one of the traders had sent his what’s app conversation with a prostitute he was having an affair with to his work email. Emails are automatically scanned for use of certain language, like swear words and sex, as well as fraud etc. Apparently she had given him an STI and they were arguing about that, their sex life, money he was spending on his wife and kids. It was hilarious - my colleague had the whole transcript on his phone because his team had to review it, and the automatic system had highlighted all the good bits!

Late 90s early days of Internet and corporate intranet. Recived email.with virus....I forwarded it to the whole company on site thinking I was helping by warning everyone. IT had a fit obviously. System down for 2 days whilst fixed. Stern talking to by manager. Ooops

I remember an office job I had. It was connected to a warehouse and I got several warnings from the manager for causing, in his words, a jovial atmosphere in the room. I was very immature. We once ventured into the warehouse to do stock checks and ended up playing hide and seek. Think a tall male colleague hiding in a massive bin of packaged products. I once got called into the managers office (probably told on) and I'm sure he was going to fire me but I saw a big book about economics, asked him about it and we ended up chatting about his masters for ages and I came out unscathed.

When I was a very junior doctor, my hospital moved to electronic note keeping. We must have been one of the first places in the country to do so. All fine, except there were nowhere near enough PCs, no laptops, and I wasn't allowed on the PCs in the ward at the nursing station. Instead of writing up patient notes in the paper files on the ward, we now had to trail along a corridor to a back office and do our notes on the PCs in there.

At night all the heating to these admin offices was turned off and would only kick in if it hit below 5 degrees or something. That winter was absolutely freezing. After 3 night shifts of sitting in my coat and fingerless gloves typing up the notes from the 30-patient evening ward round, I texted my dad who was a hospital electrician elsewhere, for advice. The next night I brought a screwdriver and got into the heating panel in the office and over-rode it using his instructions to basically tell it that the entire office corrider was 0 degrees. All was well, I was the hero of the night shift. We were cosy for weeks. Until someone complained about the now sauna-like conditions during the day and they sent electricians who discovered it had been tampered with.

After a range of scary emails that had a school-teacherish tone of "if we can't find who did this we will blame you all" I actually confessed. I was forced to repent by writing a "reflective log" about the debacle for my annual appraisal.

They never did increase the PC numbers, at least not while I worked there.

This is a really stupid one but makes me laugh- never actually got into trouble for it.
I had a customer having a massive, justifiable rant on the phone, when someone asked me if I wanted a drink. I thought I'd put him on mute and asked for tea, 1 sugar, except he wasn't on mute and proceeded to blow up- 'how dare you talk about tea when I'm speaking to you' luckily after a few minutes he saw the funny side and started laughing and the call went well.

Another time I put a nightmare customer on mute to a colleague about how stupid she was being- except I forgot that calls are still recorded while on mute, my manager listened to it and I did get into a bit of trouble that time, I was mortified!

Bloody hell that’s crazy. Why in the world would they go out of the way to report you? I also want to know how they knew who to report you too!

Last year in a job I’m no longer in, it transpired that I was missing a vital piece of the process for what I was doing.
Once the penny dropped, I never forgot again however my manager was a man and I was diagnosed in perimenopause in October last year and that wasn’t taken into consideration at all and my contract was terminated in January this year.
I honestly thought I was on my way to early onset dementia last year. The brain fog and forgetfulness was so so bad and most of my mums siblings and her mum had Alzheimer’s so it’s not impossible that I could have it (in time).
In all honesty, it’s their loss and I am now doing a job that I was born to do and get immense joy and love from

Working in a bank and on Fridays we would go out for pub lunch and have a pint or three.

One particular Friday myself and one of the other lads went off to the pub however we were both the designated key holders for the safe that day so for the hour we were gone no one could
access the safe for cash for customer withdrawals.

Manager came storming into the pub to catch us supping pints, no fucks to give.

Back in the 80’s I was a London based flight attendant for an Arab airline which was alcohol free . My friend and I often went straight from the clubs to Heathrow for our morning flight to the Middle East , changing in the loos on the way and adding another layer of make up and a lot of perfume.

At our worst we’d have a couple of lines of coke in the aircraft loos mid flight and sometimes even a shot or two of vodka . If an Arab passenger annoyed us we’d pop a drop in his juice too . Somehow we never got caught but had a few close calls .

Once after a call with someone I was telling a colleague how much said person was absolutely driving me insane...accidentally redialled said person by leaning my elbow on my phone while I was talking, they heard the whole thing ✌️

Absolutely bloody hilarious, I can almost picture it 🤣 what a memory 🤣

Working in a factory whilst much younger I fell for a wind up from one of the older blokes. The thing I was doing totally obviously wrong if you engage your brain even the tiniest bit was discovered a long way down the line where some poor bastard spent the whole day fixing every single item I'd done wrong. I still remember the line supervisor tracing the problem back up the line to my section and discovering what had happened. He wasn't even angry, just so disappointed I'd fallen for it.

Leaving work in NYC to queue up to buy an Anya Hindmarch ‘I Am Not A Plastic Bag’ bag for my sister. I put a fictitious site meeting in my diary. There was a film crew. I didn’t see them … but my boss seen me 😂 on the local news! I pretended I’d just walked past and seen the line and decided to join it …

Delivering leaflets. Just binned them. No one noticed but would have been within their rights to sack me. Call centre. When people got angry instead of escalating I just cut them off and blamed the admittedly quite old phone system. Again got away with it.

In my first proper full time job from 18-22 I wasnt a great employee really, just spent lots of time chatting to my mates on the phone, getting really drunk the night before so going in late never actually got in trouble though which is astonishing, I was good at my job and could get more done than most even when I was slacking.

On work experience from college I was 17 and slept with the person I was working for (he was 41). Got in trouble for that and they totally blamed me as obv the poor adult man couldn't control himself round the young girl 🙄 the weird thing is that whilst the other manager who was in his 50s had words with me but he didn't actually tell the college, what he did is try to grope and kiss me in the corridor one night then when I said put some crappy comments on my report saying my skirts were inappropriate for work and that I was late (I never was).

So weird, for years I totally believed I was the one in the wrong not the 40 yo manager sleeping with a 17 yo on work experience. Obv he was married but had told me he was separated, all lies but I also was harassed by his family for being a slag and causing problems in his marriage. I genuinely thought it was all my fault, I've never dated anyone from work since as it was quite traumatic.

No dramas for the last 20 years at work.

Temped at a bank over the summer basically doing data entry. When bored we'd look up famous people to see how much they had in their bank account.

What I forgot to mention is that they actually took me on full time for a few months after at that place where I slept with the boss but in a different department, I was so badly bullied (I was the 5th person to have worked for that particular person so clearly not me) so one day when she started on me I just flipped and told her to fuck off and walked out. Funnily enough they paid me for the whole trial period which was another 6 weeks and asked me not to complain. They also gave me a good reference.

I worked in an office divided into small teams. I worked on one team of about 5 or 6 of us headed up by let’s say Alan. Alan was married to a woman who used to call and have a go at him… so presumably not a very happy marriage. Unexpectedly Alan had to go to Paris for a work trip ( unusual) and decided to take a more junior woman from the team with him. The whole office was slightly agog at this pairing and there were a few chats about whether they were having an affair. My contribution to the conversation was to say “ I don’t really care about the affair but I don’t think Alan should be her line manager ” A couple of days later I was called into the senior managers and given a massive bollocking for gossiping. I was told that under no circumstances were they engaged in an affair and if I mentioned it again I was going to be disciplined. The sense of injustice about this was massive I can tell you. Some weeks later I moved offices and I heard on the grapevine that the junior woman was getting married and it was to be an arranged marriage. Ok good for her. Sometime later I met a friend and she said “ I’ve got something to tell you and you’re going to be mad “. Lo and behold she tells me yes the woman is getting married but to Alan not an arranged marriage. So yep they were having an affair and EVERYBODY who discussed it was absolutely spot on. I didn’t even care about the affair but I cared about the blatant lies and being bollocked. Although it’s been many years I definitely hold a grudge and if I ever ran into either of them I’d be tempted to call them out for that bullshit situation.

I know someone who worked for his father's company, he spent his day in an office with 6 other guys and was always pulling sickies or having days off without booking annual leave.
He told me that when the other staff were off for lunch he would watch porn at his desk and jizz on the floor, it was true because I saw pictures of the desk and carpet. He was never sacked because ... daddy's company. This was in Wokingham.