12. Hung Up On Racy Vids
I fired a guy who was in his mid-20s during his first week for browsing and downloading racy videos at work while on his lunch break. He did it on a computer located in a large open room that other people worked in at a government organization. I had caught him red-handed and warned him not to do it, already thinking this guy was going to be fired at the end of the day, but I had to go through the proper channels. Well, my ordeal was just beginning.
Then, two hours later, he did it again at the same place. At that point, I had the VPs approval to just fire him and deal with the paperwork after the weekend, so I let him go. He was shocked and didn’t say much. Being the only manager on site, I took screenshots of the sites he visited and forwarded them off to HR and the VP to document it all.
A few days later, the guy’s father called the VP to complain about his son being fired. Apparently, the fired employee never thought his being fired on the day he was busted for browsing raunchy videos on a government computer in a government office was a reason to be fired, and he never told his irate father about that.
So the VP dealt with this very diplomatically, saying the employee was viewing inappropriate content at work, was warned, and continued the bad behavior. His father didn’t accept the explanation, so the VP started reading off the list of the sites that were visited. The real kicker was that the VP believed that the fired employee was listening in on his father’s conversation via another phone. Just as the sites were being read off, there was a very audible click of another phone being hung up.