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?

I was a junior audit clerk in the late 90's and we all got issued lap top computers. I didn't have a computer at home so being bale to take it home was amazing. We were all told we were not allowed to load any software on it that was not approved, so of course I did as I wanted to use the internet at home.

I bought a modem and the software and installed it, however something went wrong and the computer would not start up. At this point I should have taken it to work and confessed, however I was terrified I would get in trouble, so I took it to PC World where my sister worked and asked them to fix it.

They did a complete refresh to factor settings, handed it back and expected me to be happy. They had obviously deleted all my work and company specific software 😩

I had to take it into work the next day and speak to the IT guy and confess.
Luckily he saw the funny side and sorted it out without anyone else finding out, however my punishment was I had to agree to a date with him.

Not really justified using companies phone to enter radio competitions.. personally I’d of picked up my mobile phone

Did you even bother reading to the end of my post or reading some of the comments? This thread is about things we’ve done at work and RIGHTLY got in trouble for….

I work in a petrol filling station and these two men came in wanting cigarettes and tobacco, they were both holding there debit cards in there hands, instead of holding the cigarettes and giving them to them after they paid I gave them to them and they grabbed them and ran off without paying, I had even given them a bag to make it easier for them. It was a couple of hundred pounds worth of stock. I was just too trusting didn’t even cross my mind they would steal them. I got warning from my mangers I was so upset at being so trusting, now I don’t trust anyone even if it’s just a £1 scratch card I hold it tight till they have paid 😂

I used to work for a company that had a few offices and I used to chat to the girls in the other offices via msn. This was also encouraged by the managers, not frowned upon. However, one time we were discussing the sexuality of one of the bosses and whether they fancied someone from my office. This boss was looking over my shoulder dictating a letter to me when a message popped up saying “Phil loves John’s willy”… like a ninja, I closed that message down and hoped Phil hadn’t seen. He said what was that!? I had to pretend like I hadn’t seen it. My heart was beating so hard. So awkward. Especially when he asked me to message Denise and ask what she said an hour later. He wasn’t so keen on us using messenger after that.

What's the point of posting then?

I think I love you 😂

Before Christmas there were so many deliveries I gave up putting the back door key away properly. At the end of my shift I went home and fell asleep. I woke up to banging on my front door and so many missed calls and messages from work, unable to unload lorries.
When I arrived back a local major roundabout was blocked by queuing lorries.

Oh ffs Denise🤣🤣 she nearly got you caught!

Your manager broke the law. Employers are not allowed to go through employee emails/messages without specific reason ie as part of a formal investigation.

At the ripe old age of 20 I was working in an office when a new girl joined who was only a couple of years older than me.

I was tasked with showing her the ropes but for whatever reason, she just wouldn't accept anything I told her and would ALWAYS go and double check with other people.

One morning just the two of us were in so I confronted her and asked her why she kept doing it.

She was normally a pretty quiet/reserved person so I was not expecting her to go nuclear and start screaming at me.

Naturally being young and stupid I screamed back at her.

Cue 5 minute screaming/slanging match that almost came to blows and ended with her storming out of the office.

We thought nothing more of it (other than the frosty atmosphere) but it turned out the Finance Director had been on her way to the office looking for our boss and had heard everything from the corridor outside.

We both got a huge dressing down

i have one where I have no idea how on earth I got away with it. It was common across the assistants to email friends using company emails as long as your work was done and there was no issue.

the back story was that at the age of 23 I had decided to ditch my boyfriend of 5 years of which everyone thought was an amazing man, except they did not have to live with him and behind closed doors and all that stuff. I was in the process of selling the flat we had together and had by luck met a guy that was really genuine and nice (now my husband)

So back to emailing what I though was a friend on company email saying I had booked Thursday and Friday off to go on dates with new man., said friend had decided that she did not like the time I was spending with the new guy of which the email arguments erupted, with her making accusations and threading to tell ex that I had been cheating on him but equally me adding my 10 pence on her attitude along with my I dont care what you tell my ex as things can’t get any worse attitude being to go and tell him what you like as I don’t really care. Due to not getting the reaction she desired from me she then placed a call into my HR department making an official formal complaint that I had been swearing at her (one thing I did not do on email) and also threatened her life over company email.
fortunately and gratefully to my lack of knowledge over my two days of I was officially investigated and on my return to work on Monday was called into an official formal meeting with HR and the head of my department to discuss the finding.

I took a dressing down for abusing company email and then told to go and make myself some new friends as the friends I have, I far from need enemies…. I also did ditch my friend.

I can also say nearly 10 years later she went through family to get in touch to attempt to right her wrongs and admitted she did it to just be nasty. I forgave her but we are still not friends as that leopard certainly did not change it spots…

Not me but my work used to have after work drinks and one night it got out of hand and a few guys broke into the confidential waste bin and started wheeling each other up and down the office and let their friends in through the windows 😩 they got fired obviously.

@justanothermanicmonday1 You've reminded me - this wasn't me, but one morning the person who opened up at work found a bra had been stuffed through the letterbox. It turned out to belong to one of the women at work who'd done it drunkenly on her way home from a club with friends. What amazed me was that she admitted to it - I'd have denied all knowledge. She didn't get into trouble as far as I know.

“Sleep nibble” 😆

I got pulled up on my outfit during dress down day once, I was wearing cream linen shorts and an oversized white shirt that covered the shorts, so it looked like a short dress. Looking back it was really fashionable but yeah, probably not the best outfit for a corporate environment!

Omg😂 imagine admitted that! That's so funny though hahaha

Sleep nibbling is a new concept to me but what a great image! A colleague who worked in journalism in the 80s would agree on how great it was to be shitfaced constantly 🤣

Me i'm a goodie two shoes. Been bawled at for minor learning fuckups, no big deal, but nothing major. Two worst were misunderstandings - a colleague tried to frame me for theft 🤨 but it was ironed out, i couldnt PROVE i hadnt pocketed the £100 cash in question but our employers didnt believe her and my suggestion of a better cash handling system was a good move. The other was being called up by HQ over the phone bill and i had made the odd call or two to a boyfriend while at work to save my bills on my mobile but when they showed me the bill asking why i called this number constantly it was my own mobile number because i was diverting the landline to my mobile during lunch and breaks and so i could be visible to clients, out and about, so i actually looked really diligent 😂

Not long after I got engaged, my fiancé and I had a meal with the colleague I lived with and her boyfriend. Usually I wouldn’t drink much alcohol on a work night, but we had champagne and it escalated into a mega drinking session.

I was incredibly hungover in the morning, having spent half the night with my head down the toilet, and probably shouldn’t have gone to work, but I was due to complete a job that I had put in motion a couple of days earlier, and it really needed me to be the one to follow it up. There was also a work culture of going in when sick, unless you were actively vomiting or bed ridden as the work came in and had to be done daily, so if someone wasn’t there, everyone else had to pick up the slack.

It would all have been fine had the task gone as it should have. I had done it many times before without any problems whatsoever, but this time there was an anomalous result which, because I was performing badly, I failed to pick up and respond to correctly.

I sent the results in (they went to an outside agency) and a couple of days later, the shit absolutely hit the fan. My failure to pick up on this problem meant that all kinds of actions that should have been put in motion two days earlier hadn’t been done, which meant that I was basically responsible for a massive breach that put all kinds of things at risk.

The outside agency had to sort it all out, then put me through retraining so that I never got it wrong again. Quite amazingly though, my wonderful boss, when faced with all this, comforted me afterwards and said he had noticed I was under the weather that day and that it could happen to anyone.

I think he knew exactly why I was under the weather that day, but still didn’t blame me. It was the only place I ever worked where sometimes, on Friday afternoons, someone would nip to the bar next door and come back with pints for us. My boss was near retirement age and his attitudes harked back to a time when it was normal to sometimes drink on the job as it was recognized that the hours we sometimes had to work were so inhumane that it was normal to have a social life while still being available to work.

Not necessarily. A company can in policy check all goings on with any business equipment or software. This includes emails, messages, software, files and docs and Internet.

Drying my swimming costume in a film drying cabinet and forgetting to switch it off before leaving for the weekend could have burned down some expensive new labs at a northern university had someone in over the weekend not smelt burning.

As a trainee solicitor I was tasked with submitting two very similar claims to the high courts in Delhi and Mumbai. I copied and pasted. No one noticed until a high court judge in Delhi threw our claim out because he seemed not to have jurisdiction. Whoops! Tbf, I was no great shakes as a lawyer.

As a solicitor, doing something that would get a claim struck out was my worst nightmare!

Years ago now , I was about 18 , me and another girl used to do half a shift each on a Sunday instead of one of us doing the whole day . It was a job that was cash in hand … each week we just had to write down what we had worked and they would pay us . One week we both put the Sunday down and were both paid the full shift ( it was very low pay if that helps but it doesn’t 🤣 ) . We did it a few more times with the thought of we will just say it was a mistake . The company never kept proper logs , or so we thought , and we only did it a few times . So we never actually got caught but a few months later everyone was called in to the office and told that the wages bill that week had been too high ( basically the number of shifts available and number of people working could only come to a certain amount and it had came to a lot higher and they realised it had been for a while, so now we had to have a rota and if we swapped or anything or worked extra then it had to be approved by management ). So never actually got into trouble I guess but it was quite a group telling off ! Turned out other staff had been adding extra shifts - one girl worked one shift and put down 5 - and had been getting paid !!

I look back on it now and it was awful - it was stealing !

The company however refused to put anyone on the books and it was all cash in hand and filled with young people or single mothers. They paid very low. They did get caught out after I left and stopped all the cash in hand and had to pay minimum wage .

Many years ago I started my first job as an office junior. I was seventeen. I loved it but my dad kept urging me to get a better job. So after 6 months I resigned to go to a better paid job. The boss was furious and phoned my dad at work. The next thing I was called into his office and offered double my wages if I'd stay. I was thrilled. Later that day the bosses secretary found me and asked for all the details. Stupidly I told her about the pay rise. Just before hometime I was called into a partners meeting. Four grim faces looking at me. I was told the pay rise had been withdrawn as I'd told the secretary about it. They told me my job was gone and I should leave straightaway. I was devastated and held back the tears until I got outside. To treat a young girl like that was horrible. Obviously the boss had thought his wages offer was too generous so he sent his secretary to trick me into telling. My mum met one of the managers at church some month's months later and she said she was ashamed at how i was treated.