From stopping crimes to wearing orange, sometimes HR makes some strange decisions about what warrants termination. Would you make the same decision?
Usually a termination is a difficult decision that could be based on a range of factors, from financial to disciplinary, but occasionally it seems employers are making decisions just for the heck of it.
Fired for stopping a carjacking
Fort Lauderdale waiter Juan Canales noticed a commotion outside his workplace and saw a woman was being carjacked by a man with a knife. Canales rushed outside and wrestled the carjacker to the ground, then waited for the police to arrive. He was promptly fired by his employer, who apparently didn’t appreciate the publicity.
Fired for wearing orange to work
Staff at a Florida law firm has a tradition of going out for drinks on payday, and wearing orange as a sign of solidarity. In 2012, the law firm fired 14 people who had been following the tradition for months because new management felt that the orange-wearing was some form of protest.
Fired for repeating a Seinfeld joke
Cedar Falls resident John Preston was fired from his job for dragging an in joke out too long. When a group of co-workers started saying “You’re so good looking” rather than “bless you” whenever someone sneezed (in reference to a Seinfeld episode) it was all in good fun. Preston kept saying it long past the point that it was still funny and it was eventually decided that it counted as sexual harassment, and Preston was terminated.
Fired for TYPING IN ALL CAPS
The inability to find the caps lock button is admittedly annoying, as is coloured font but Vicki Walker unsurprisingly won her wrongful termination suit. Her employer claimed she typed consistently in all caps and red font but was only able to produce one email example during the court proceedings.
Fired for a 50-year-old minor crime
A history of criminal behaviour or undisclosed convictions could be a reason to fire someone, but this one might take that concept to an unnecessary extreme. Last year Wells Fargo employee Richard Eggers, then 68, was fired from his job at a Wells Fargo bank because he had committed a crime – 50 years earlier. In 1963 Eggers had used a cardboard cutout of a dime to operate a Laundromat washing machine in a Laundromat when he was a teenager. New federal banking regulations forbade the employment of anyone who has been convicted of a crime involving “dishonesty, breach of trust or money laundering,” but Egger’s offense probably wasn’t quite what the regulators meant.
