We’re going to take you behind the scenes of what happens when someone loses their job, told by the managers who had to make that tough call. These aren’t your typical workplace stories; they’re more like real-life dramas. From employees doing the unexpected to managers trying to keep their cool in the most awkward situations, these stories are all about work-life gone wild.
I was working as the manager for a contract security company. I hired this skinny young lady and she worked out great for a couple of weeks. She always showed up for her shifts and did her job.
One part of the hiring process is that we take fingerprints and send them to the state. I recall when I was fingerprinting her, that she had big hands, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time.
After a couple of weeks, she didn’t show up for work for her shift. I tried to call her her house but there was no answer. I was concerned, so I called her emergency contact and a woman answered. I asked if she knew where ‘Nettie’ was and the woman replied that she was Nettie. I explained who I was and that I was looking for Nettie who worked as a security guard for me. The woman’s reply was “Oh, not again.”
The woman told me that the person that I had hired was her nephew and that he had done this before. He had taken her social security card and used it to get a driver’s license in her name.
I finally got in touch with my employee a couple of days later and told him/her that she needed to come into the office to see me instead of showing up for her next shift. I told her about my conversation with her aunt and asked her if it was true. He/she didn’t deny any of it but never admitted to being a guy either. I told her that she was fired for giving us false information on her application.
A woman at my office was hired as a software programmer. That was until our HR manager caught her hiding in the women’s bathroom with a very large how-to-do programming textbook. Turns out she had no f*cking clue what she was doing.
I was a manager in a bank. We had a mandatory 3-day training before the person could start working in the branch. I got a call in the middle of the first day of training for my new hire, the trainer was asking where she was. I called her cell and she said, “Well it snowed a lot last night, so I assumed the training would be canceled. I’ll just show up tomorrow.” I told her that we would need to have her start the following week because all three days needed to be completed in order. She told me that wouldn’t work because she had a 5-day Vegas vacation set next week (never told me when we told her the start date). I should have fired her right there, but we didn’t have many good applicants so I gave her one more chance. I told her that NO MATTER WHAT, be at training. Next week, I got a call from the trainer asking where she was again. I called her and she said, “My flight back from Vegas got delayed and I only had like 3 hours of sleep. I didn’t want to show up tired and make a bad impression”. So I fired her.
Used to work retail, and every holiday season we would bring on a bunch of new sales staff to keep up with the crowds. This particular new hire (let’s call him Bob) aced the interview: well dressed, well-informed, affable, etc., and to be honest, when you’re hiring seasonal staff you’re not looking for the best of the best, just warm bodies to fill space; so Bob was a dream.
Bob shows up for his first day at 9 AM, a full hour before the store opens. Pre-open generally involves a bit of tidying, making changes to the registers etc. As the only manager in the store, I was in charge of the registers. While I’m busy flipping fifties for twenties and tens, Bob’s a few feet away folding shirts.
So I drop a roll of pennies and then bend over to pick them up. When I stand back up, Bob’s on the other side of the counter stuffing the stack of $50s I had just pulled from the registers into his pocket.
He didn’t even try to make an excuse, just gave me a ‘whoops’ look and silently put the stack back on the counter. Within 5 minutes he had signed his termination papers and was out the door. Total employment time: 10 minutes.
He slashed my tire after I told him to go to work instead of sitting in the break room.
The boss’s son decided he wanted to be a graphic designer. But he had this problem – he always had other things to do on deadline day. Once a week, we put out the paper, and it usually involves 10-12 gruelling hours of work. He always had some lengthy errand to run, and because his father was never around, he kept doing this, leaving me to do all the work.
Finally, his dad tells him he has to stay at work and can only leave if I give him permission. The very next deadline, he asks to leave for the afternoon. “Call your dad,” I told him. “I’m not asking dad, I’m asking YOU,” he says. “Then the answer is no.” He got highly pissed off and finally yelled at me: “Your attitude SUCKS!”
Two days later, he waltzes in, sits down, puts his feet up on his desk and his hands behind his head and says, “We need to talk about your attitude.” Somehow, I refrained from killing him, but I told him I would never speak to him again. His father backed me up and he was done.
Last I heard, the entitled little sh*t manages a radio shack. Perfect fit.
I had this girl working for me as a lab technician. She was this little Chinese girl, 7 months pregnant, really nice. One day she came up to my office crying – her purse had been stolen from her locker. The lock had been cut. It contained her cell phone, car keys, green card, money – everything. Apparently, it is very expensive to replace a lost green card – she said it was 400+ dollars. Also, since her car keys were now gone she had no way to drive home. She lived 50 miles away. Keep in mind: 7 months Pregnant.
So her husband had to leave his job to bring her the spare keys so she could drive her car home. Meanwhile, I reviewed the security tapes with HR and – lo and behold we caught a girl on camera with a f*cking pair of bolt cutters going into the locker room. The girl we saw on the tape was one of the other lab technicians – my employee and someone the victim worked with every single day.
We used the company bolt cutters to get into her locker and we found the bolt cutters she had used. We also found food and a bunch of other sh*t she was not allowed to have in her locker. At that point, we didn’t need to prove the theft to fire her but we were going to try anyway. The next day she comes in to get her check and we bring her into HR and show her the bolt cutters. She admits that she took the purse, took the money and credit cards and threw the rest in the trash. We told her that she was fired and to please wait while we wrote her another check so she wouldn’t have to come back in the next week to pick up her last check.
While she was “waiting” we called the cops who came and arrested her. She took the cop back to her apartment where she gave them the purse which she had not thrown in the trash after all. She ended up getting deported to Mexico.
My mom had to fire a woman who completely fabricated being pregnant. She was overweight, so I guess she thought she could get away with it? She accepted gifts from residents & staff (this is at an assisted living community) and planned on taking the maternity leave as a little vacation. Not sure what she planned on doing when she came back and had no baby… she got fired after bending over and picking up a box like it was nothing when she was supposedly 7 months along.
I work in pizza delivery and we had a guy back in the day (fellow manager) who tried to shut down the store 5 hours before the time that corporate set for us to close. He clocked every person out and sent them home and then just refused to take the phone calls or anything like that. He was fired immediately after our boss found out and he even tried to come into work the next day like everything was fine.
I used to run a sports bar a few nights a week. One night when I was off and the owner was supposed to be there running things, I got a call from one of the bartenders telling me that I needed to come in.
When I got there, the owner was sitting in a booth in the back corner, passed out drunk. One of the bartenders was so drunk he was staggering around breaking things, the kitchen staff had walked out, one of the waitresses had burned herself trying to cook something, and the doorman was apologizing to an irate group of sports fans.
Apparently, the owner and the drunk bartender had started pounding shots, the owner got drunk and screamed at everybody, and the cook and dishwasher walked out with food still on the grill. I sent the drunk bartender home, sent the waitress to the ER, cooked up a bunch of the food that was prepped and sent it out comped, closed the kitchen, comped a round for the house, and we ended up having a fun night. Didn’t make any money for the owner, but it was fun.
After we closed, I took the owner home, and by then he was sober enough to be remorseful. He decided on the spot to hire me as full-time manager, asked me to hire an assistant, and pretty much stayed out of the place from then on.
In effect, I fired the owner.
I was supervising a call center where the agents did market research surveys… one of the new guys from the recent training class had been working for a few days and had yet to even get decently into a survey with anyone… like, he’d sit there for four hours at a time doing nothing but occasionally throwing out an intro. But, since he was a quiet kid and didn’t complain, I spent more time with the others in his training group and didn’t focus on his lack of production until about his third day… I just wanted to hear how he was pitching the survey to give him some pointers… So I tapped in (they couldn’t tell if we were listening in and I was on the other side of the room)… First call: Answering Machine… second call: An old man answered- “Hello?”
And the trainee says: “I know where you LIIIIIVE p*ssy. Beeeotch!” and hangs up.
It took me a minute to compose myself… but I asked him to come into my office and told him “Yeah, you can’t work here anymore… “
We had just trained this nice little Hispanic girl named Olga. On her first day, she comes back from her break over an HOUR late like it was nothing. We thought she had quit and counted her register down and replaced her. With a puzzled expression, she looked at us and asked why. We then asked why she felt it tactful to come back so inappropriately late. Her response, in the most accurate Speedy Gonzales voice, replied “This ladyyyy, she was telling me a stooooryy.” We were dumbfounded at how she honestly did not understand that what she did was wrong, and as mentioned before in this thread, just needed a warm body to monkey the registers. We let her stay and fired her 2 weeks later.
Used to manage a pizza joint years ago, and another manager hired this Juggalo. My first time working a shift with the guy he was practically sleeping on the counter, I told him he needed to get to work and he blew up. Walking around the store, stomping his feet, taking his shirt off wanting to fight me in front of customers. I’m an ex-bouncer and I don’t take any sh*t from guys like that and called his bluff. He ended up leaving, accidentally hitting another delivery driver’s car as he sped out of the parking lot.
Do I really need to tell you he was fired?
My husband is a manager and his employee somehow had another employee’s I.D. and then stole that person’s check and cashed it.
Caught it all on camera.
She still denied it.
I had to send a guy to a remote gas/petroleum refinery site for an inspection, previously he had been reliable on most occasions.
However, on this occasion, he never showed up for the pre-drug/alcohol test the day before he had to fly out and gave me a long-winded excuse basically blaming his car troubles. At this point I would have gone myself to the site however I was just back from a bone graft to my collarbone so I wasn’t going anywhere. The director made the final decision to send him anyway against my recommendations.
We flew him to the site to do his onsite induction, where he would do the D&A test anyway. Partway through his induction he got up and left… I called him that night but never got an answer, so I checked with his accommodation and the hotel claimed he had checked in within the last 1/2 hour. I was just glad nothing major had happened. The next morning I spoke to the client and the client informed me that the staff member apologized for leaving abruptly and had to rush off and deal with some personal issues. I don’t press it any longer, two hours go by and I get a call from the client stating that they’ve kicked him offsite because they’ve found him asleep on site and when they woke him he became extremely aggressive.
The client is furious about this and says we are a cowboy of an operation for sending someone like this and to fly someone up the next day to finish the job. That night we had a conference call with the client stating that were no longer going to be working for them due to this issue, costing our company roughly $1 million from the loss of the contract.
We bring him up the day after he flies back to ask about his actions, I’m supposed to head this up and get his side of the story except before we even get into really discussing things my director asks “If we are to drug test you today would you fail?” he answers “yes” and he was told he’s being terminated instantly, he starts yelling at the top of his lungs and blaming his actions on everyone else. I told him he needed to leave straight away or the police would get called. He does, and he leaves. Then for the next month, our admin received emails about how I was terrible at my job and that I should be fired for not listening to his problems (which he had never spoken to me about).
So yeah that was the day I fired my brother and found out he was addicted to m*th.
One week. I got a call from the county jail because this girl I had just hired had been arrested and she refused to give any info to the police except for the fact that she worked for this particular store. They called me trying to figure out her info and a person to contact about her arrest. I told them I couldn’t give out that info but I would call her emergency contact to let them know that she was in jail.
I called this girl’s emergency contact (who was her mom) and told the mom that her daughter was currently sitting in jail. All the mom said was, “figures” and she hung up on me.
After she was released from jail, about two days later she ended up in the hospital from alcohol poisoning. So yeah, I had to let her go. The worst part is that I actually liked her.
I let myself get pressured by my boss into hiring a copywriter essentially because she had a huge rack. She did a couple of writing tests that came back OK and her attributed work on other sites and magazines was passable so I didn’t fight it too much.
First day on the job she announced that she is both dyslexic and suffers from adult attention deficit disorder and will need all sorts of special equipment to work with and longer deadlines to complete her work. Not really what you’re looking for in a wordsmith. When I pointed that out she rattled off a list of other companies that she was in the process of suing for unfair dismissal.
Happily for me, she also began stalking someone else at work, ultimately sending him hundreds of sexually explicit text messages, so we were able to get rid of her that way.
An employee (let’s call him “Bob”) is out for a week, allegedly with an infection of some sort. One day Bob unexpectedly returned to work about 3 hours past the start of his normal shift. He tells me he is feeling better and wants to get back to work. He looks awful and I try to convince him to go home but he insists on working so I walk with him to his cubicle and ask him if he needs anything. He asks for a glass of orange juice and I happily run to the break room to get it for him.
A half hour passes and another employee enters my office looking a bit concerned. He suggests I go check on Bob, saying he doesn’t look well. Upon entering the area where Bob sits, I find him slumped over his desk, head down and eyes closed. I wake him up and tell him he needs to go home. He agrees, takes a sip of his orange juice and tells me he just feels awful that he’s been out of work for so long. I realize that letting him take the train home alone wouldn’t be safe so I grab a nearby phone and call him a town car.
In a frantic moment, I grab his backpack and rush back to help him up. As I’m investigating the massive red mark on Bob’s forehead, which soon turns into a very impressive swollen mess, an empty bottle of Vodka falls out of his backpack. Bob isn’t sick… Bob is wasted. Trying to stay calm and get Bob out of the building without the whole office knowing he is drunk. His car is waiting for him at the curb and I ask a security guard to help me get him in the car since I can barely hold him up myself.
The driver quickly gets out and tells me he won’t be taking Bob anywhere. I open Bob’s door and try to help him out of the car, just to be greeted with “Don’t f*cking touch me! I’ll kill you if you touch me!”. I walk away, unsure what to do next, and watch as Bob falls out the car door and sprawls out on the sidewalk as a high-level executive from my company walks by and says “Come to my office as soon as you’re done here.” Lovely.
I see a police officer across the street and I run over asking for advice. The officer suggests I call 9-1-1 so I do. The cavalry arrives; ambulances, police cars, and fire trucks are included. Bob is angry, screaming at the cops and EMTs while they strap him to a gurney and secure him in the back of the ambulance. They tell me what hospital he’s going to and take him away.
I head back inside to call Bob’s Mother and let her know what happened. She’s not surprised at all and admits she was fully aware of his alcohol problem. I walk up to the high-level exec’s office and he immediately starts laughing as I enter. He just wanted the gossip.
Obviously, Bob was fired. My boss actually had me send a courier with a termination letter to his hospital room, which I felt awful about. I only heard from Bob once after that day… he was in rehab and doing better, and he had called to ask if he could use me as a reference.
Supervisor in a call center. We worked with EBT cards. All calls are recorded. All agents know this because we have them listen to enough of them on one-on-ones. This girl got into an argument with a caller and told him “Maybe you should get a job and get off food stamps.” That wasn’t even the worst part of the call, just the part I can quote verbatim. There was also a rant accusing him of being personally responsible for the Atlantic slave trade. My manager was like ‘It really can’t be that bad…’. No, dude. Listen to the call. She was fired.
I was giving a new hire a tour of the facility, and we stopped in the kitchen. I explained there was to be no eating on the work floor, but the break room and lounge were both available for use during mealtimes. I pointed out the cupboards and fridge where he could store his lunch items and showed him the coffee pot for common use. As I was pointing out where the coffee supplies were kept, he walked right up to the fridge, opened it scanned it, took out a lunchbox and started going through it. I don’t remember exactly what he took out, but it was a piece of fruit, a drink and a baggie of cookies or crackers.
We sat down at a table and talked about some other basics, and said we needed to get back on the floor. He returned to the fridge and grabbed something else out, and I reminded him his food needed to be kept in the designated areas and he’d have to wait until later to finish his snack.
Not 30 minutes later, while the new guy was watching some training videos, a long-time employee came to my office upset that half her lunch was missing. As she described the items I asked her if she had a red such-and-such lunch bag, and she said yes, that was hers. I immediately knew what had happened.
Pulled the new guy into my office and explained he must have the same lunch bag as his coworker and that it was her lunch he’d been eating.
The new guy replied that he did not, in fact, mix up her lunch bag with his own, as he hadn’t even brought his own lunch. Yep, he stole someone else’s food and ate it right in front of me on his first day. Needless to say, he was terminated for theft after less than two hours on the job.
I was working as a duty manager at an arcade to which I had been transferred to help get it into shape with the new manager they sent there. I had started at another site as an attendant and got made supervisor within a few months. The place previously had one supervisor who didn’t give a sh*t and 8 lazy attendants and 1 really over-the-top hard-working girl.
A lot of the machines were down on cash and I was told by my boss to find out who was stealing and to simply get rid. So one by one I start fixing the machines so the meters read correctly and so that only I or my boss can get into them. The machines start to register what they’re taking and everything seems to be going well.
I walk into the office in the back of the arcade to hear the guys b*tching in the tea room about how hard it is now to steal from the machines. One or two of them make suggestions on how to get around the new locks and the working meters and another makes jokes about “Giving Askura a kicking” which actually progresses into a conversation about how they would.
This goes on for about 10 minutes with me making a fair few mental notes. As they obviously weren’t going to go do their jobs and were just mooching I decided to ask them about it. So I go into the office to take a seat and call them in.
The four of them come out with a look of uncertainty and ask what’s the problem. I then tell them off the bat. They’re facing disciplinary action for stealing from the company, for intentionally damaging company property, taking unscheduled breaks and for one guy for falling asleep at the cash desk. (This guy I felt sorry for prior to as for the first job I ever had 8 years ago I worked alongside him)
They initially denied it but when I stated various methods and repeated parts of their conversation they buckled. Passed it on to my boss who raged the f*ck out and so he fired them. So 4 people in one sitting.
I gave my secretary a document that I wanted incorporated into a letter I had written, and she hucked the document like a frisbee into her trashcan. It was literally my only copy so I had to walk over and fish it out. That was her last day.
Mine was a fun one. The older guy hired him for a customer service position in a call center via a temp agency. Well after 2 weeks he called me to tell me he had a heart attack and was going to be out for a while. Seeing as how he works for a temp agency and not directly for us, my response is ‘OK, just let the agency know, and let me know when you can come back in’. The guy would call me about once a week just to let me know he was alive.
After about 6 weeks I happen to be looking at a report of payouts from the temp agency, and I see this guy’s name on there claiming 40 hrs. After some digging, we figured out that he had been forging my signature on them since the day he had a ‘heart attack’.
I ended up waiting at the temp agency for him to come pick up his ‘check’…and by check, I mean 2 cops with handcuffs.
I’m the lead of a small programming team in a large engineering firm. Needing to hire someone, I’d pulled a few resumes, but since I was going on holiday, I’d left the interviews to my 2nd in command. I get back and I’m told they made an offer to this Chinese girl. “Is she any good?” I asked. He just handed me her resume. It was impressive as heck. She had a master’s, had worked for IBM, etc. Almost a bit overqualified for the position, but it’s a tough economy, right? Plus one of our star programmers was from China with similar qualifications and I figured if we’d found another one of him, we were flying.
So day 1 she comes in, and her workstation is set up for her. We give her a bit of an orientation, then we put her at her workstation. She immediately tells me her mouse isn’t working. As the back of the PC is facing me, I say “It’s not plugged in.” She sits there for a bit, wiggles the mouse, then eventually asks “How do I fix that?” And my jaw drops a bit. So then, acting like it’s just casual conversation, start asking her some basic programming questions. Has she ever used recursion? What are some of the things to avoid with real-time processes? Stuff that even summer students would find obvious and is normally part of our interview process. She knew none of it. Nothing. She’d babble a response, but it would have nothing to do with the questions asked. And I fired her. Actually, it was more like “You don’t really have the skills you listed on your resume, do you?” “No.” “OK, I think you should leave now.” Luckily our contract with her had a probation clause so it wasn’t a problem. She did get one full day of pay.
Talked to my 2nd in command. While he’s fluent in English, it’s not his native language. He tells me when he interviewed her, he couldn’t quite understand her accented English, but she seemed confident and knowledgeable so he pretty much hired her based on her resume. But what I don’t get is how she really expected to pull this off. We were hiring for a very technical position with some very clearly defined skill requirements. Something you just couldn’t fake.
We hosted a networking breakfast every other month and my assistants had to meet me at 6.45 a.m. to set up and check people in.
This kid shows up 1/2 hour late, sits at the check-in table, and doesn’t look at anyone, just crosses his arms and looks pissed. I tell him to check people in and he says “It’s too early for this, I don’t even want to be here.” I tell him “Then go home” and he picks up his jacket, walks up to me like he is going to say something/strike me, huffs and puffs and takes off.
I get to the office at 9 a.m., and he’s sitting at his desk like nothing happened. I tell him “OK, guy, obviously you are fired, let’s pack your things up.” He just stared blankly at me and asked quietly “Um, why?” I reply “Are you godd*mn kidding me? Why would I want an assistant who I have to babysit?” He replies “Yeah, you have a point” and leaves.
I managed a bowling center for about 10 years. I hired a kid who’d never had a job before, and he was a little on the “odd” side, but he seemed pretty smart, so I took a chance on him. About a month into his employment, a very very large woman came in with her family. This kid couldn’t believe how big she was. He kept insisting to everyone that it was a costume, “That has to be a fat suit”, he kept saying. He wouldn’t give it up. He then decided to get the truth… he walked up to this poor woman in front of her entire family, and asked her, “Are you really that fat, or is it just a costume?”
I’ve never been so dumbfounded in my life. He was suspended immediately, and terminated after the HR investigation.
The woman was so upset, she ended up getting some pretty hefty compensation from the hotel, which was much deserved.
I had a guy working for me that showed up late EVERY time for his shift. His excuse was that he tried every single time to convince me that I told him that it was okay for him to be late. What. After writing him up multiple times for this he finally started showing up on time… when he showed up. After this whole thing, he started calling off between 2:40 PM and 2:59 PM prior to his 3:00 PM shift. I finally said Enough is enough and let him know that final time that he doesn’t have to worry about calling off anymore because he’s not welcome at my site any longer.
He began giving me a story about how I told him he could be late oh I told him he could call off on such short notice… again, what? Nope, didn’t want to hear it. I gladly worked a 12-hour day so that I could be done with his horrendous work ethic. After this, he filed a complaint against me for discrimination in which case I say the following:
document document document, my friends.
I used to manage a sports retail store. We had a supervisor who was pretty good at his job and was a pretty nice guy. By the sound of it, he’s had a fairly hard life and on his key ring, he’s got two rubber initials, for his brother and sister who died in a car crash a few years ago. A few weeks after he started he came to me and told me his mum was really ill in hospital in London (the store I ran is in Manchester) and would it be possible for him to not work weekends while she’s in so that he can go and visit her. I spoke to my area manager about it and we agreed it would be fine.
So six months go by. He’s had every weekend off because he’s been away visiting his dying mother in hospital. One day I get a call at the shop; a doctor asking to speak to let’s-call-him-Fred. Fred takes the call in my office, and when he comes out it’s obvious he’s been in floods of tears. He tells me his mum has died and he needs to leave. Of course, I say that’s OK.
He takes the week off and comes back to work but he tells me when he comes back that his dad is in a bad way because of losing his wife and can he still have the weekends off to visit him now? I say yes, that’s fine; we’ve managed so far without him in on weekends and really we’re pretty used to it. We notice that he’s got a new rubber initial on his keyring for his mum, although he never says anything about it.
More months go by and his dad isn’t getting any better. It’s pretty obvious that Fred is going to be getting another one of those calls soon, and sure enough, it comes. We let him go home.
He’s been off for about a week and a half when this middle-aged couple come into the shop looking for him. I apologise and tell them unfortunately he’s away because of a bereavement and we don’t know when he’ll be ready to come to work. The couple looks really confused and asks who died because he hasn’t said anything to them. I say I can’t tell them, basically because I don’t know who they are. Then I ask who they are.
They’re his parents, of course. His living, breathing, never-were-in-hospital parents. I apologise again for Fred not being there and somehow getting them out of the shop.
Fred comes back to work. We have the big confrontation, of course. Turns out he’s been playing football on the weekends for some semi-pro teams and the two times he got ‘that’ call he was having trials for professional clubs. He agreed to hand in his notice and was gone that afternoon.
The kicker being? This was a frikking sports retail store. If he’d told me he wanted weekends off to play football? I probably would have given them to him anyway.
A father came to my restaurant with his daughter, and the cook wrote his phone number on the girl’s burger wrapper. The girl ended up being 13. Dad was PISSED, rightfully so. Cook got fired right then and there.
We had a field tech that was awesome, probably the best I’ve ever seen or heard of. He was knowledgeable, skilled, and personable. He was always early, worked great under stress when things went south and often finished jobs early. If we had off-hour issues, he was always available and it seemed like he was in his truck and ready to get going right away.
Well, it turns out that he was always in his truck and ready to go. He had been living in his company truck for some time and just pulled off the side of the road each night at a utility pole climbed up, stole some cable TV and set up shop for the night. We found that out and had to let him go.
One day, when I was an assistant sales manager, my boss returned from lunch just furious. It turned out that one of our sales reps had gone with her husband to lunch at the same restaurant, sat in the booth adjacent to our boss, never noticed our boss, and spent the entire time complaining to her husband about what a vicious b*tch our boss was.
By the time the sales rep got back, our boss had her final check and termination notice ready. She made me do the actual firing while she sat silently in the room shooting icy looks at the sales rep. Most awkward termination ever.