Has setting up reasonable boundaries, telling a boss no, or refusing to act in an unethical way ever directly or indirectly gotten you fired?

Nuzz88 · 2015-02-10T18:55:11+00:00

A close friend of mine who is an engineer. He was working in a factory, and he had an apprentice who had worked there 4 years, but still learning everything and not 100% clued up on everything.

So my friend books a week off for a stag party going to amsterdam (I was also there and this is how I know the story). He gets a frantic call from his boss while standing in the airport that the machinery had broken down completely and his apprentice cant fix it.

The machine being down was costing the company a lot. His Boss told him he needed him back, and he flat out refused because we were 30 minutes away from boarding the plane. Boss got crazy, calls back and offers him £2000 to miss the flight and fly out tomorrow.

My friend who had already been drinking for about 2 hours refused.

So when he returned from amsterdam, the second he walked in for his shift, his boss made him take a randomly selected drug test and then fired him.

RunawayGrain · 2015-02-10T22:30:22+00:00

Yep. Back in the late eighties, I worked for a manufacturing firm to make money to get through college. Despite the fact that the kid was a convicted sexual predator the boss had some kind of delusion that his kid was superman and could do no wrong. The kid had mental issues to the point that most of the female employees would exit the room if he entered, and many male employees were packing firearms at work -- he was violent at times. I pointed out mistakes the kid had made and refused to back off. I got canned one morning. Almost my entire department had left for the competition due to the kid, and they got me hired with the competition within a few days.

The moral is that any boss that will fire you for refusing to act in an unethical manner, isn't a boss you want to have. Also remember that relationships with co-workers can be a resource, so cultivate them as such. I still keep up with friends from this job more than twenty years later. I also guarantee that if anyone asks why I got canned from there, I can produce at least ten reference letters explaining what a hole the place was.

karmasutur3 · 2015-02-11T16:56:39+00:00

Yes.

Not fired, but pigeonholed.

I was hired as a temp worker at a company. Within six months, I was offered a salaried project manager position.

It was a small 'family' run franchise, a manufacturing place. The sales guy was a successful, high selling, record setting dude. He'd been there 15 years. The owner was a very, very intellectually incapable woman.

So, the sales guy was also hugely lazy. Thought he was the big swinging dick there, and I suppose he was. But being a lazy fuck, he would gloss over all the details of the projects he sold, and he would lie blatantly to clients, about what we could, or couldn't do.

So, for example, sell a sign, tell them it could be run on windows, but required mac. Then, in order to cover his ass with the boss, would weazel the situation to put the blame on the project managers.

Meanwhile, the owner/boss bitch lady would be unable to understand the simplest shit. After 25 years of co-running the company with her husband (who was the real brains, but apparently to get away from her, opened another branch a state away, and never saw the bitch) she just spewed hate and rage at anyone who questioned her, and would co-opt any good idea you had and claim it as her own.

So what did I do? Well, I started documenting everything the shitty big dick sales dude did, so that the next time I was sitting in a meeting, and he blamed some fallout from some project on me, I could call him out, with verified documentation that could not be altered. That way I could avoid the bitchfest that came my way from the owner when this shit went down.

So he lied blatantly in a meeting, blaming me, boss started in on me, I showed her the documentation......

....But I fucking miscalculated. The sales dude went fucking ballistic. I thought he might back down a little, give me a bit of leeway (I was the fucking project manager after all) and our working relationship might be less shitball.

Nope. he flipped the fuck out, refused to talk to me, even over email after that, the boss started an extended 'fuck you' smear campaign on me. I mean really flipped out. I was dead calm when I showed the documentation. He literally screamed "THESE ARE MY FUCKING PROOOOOOJEEEEEECCCCTS!" in the room, and I was getting ready to trade blows with the dude, when he sat down.

Two weeks after this, the boss demoted me to the installation department, but with the same pay I enjoyed as a project manager.

The obvious play there being, make me do manual labor until I said fuck it and left, but not insulting me by cutting pay, thus making me less likely to go for blood against the sales guy.

I caved after a year, and went back to college. I learned a ton of lessons.

But primarily is that in dealing with super shitbag superiors, never underestimate how far they will go to protect their laziness and positions of power. Also, don't call your enemies out in public. I read a lot more Sun Tzu after that whole shit.

Temuzjin · 2015-02-10T19:16:35+00:00

During a nearly unpaid internship, I was somehow given sole responsibility for doing a data analysis that was to be presented to a bank by the boss himself (the company had ~5 people total).

Eventually, during a week in which I had already worked some 8 hours longer than was in my contract, my boss asked me to work on the project some more. I refused. He then informed me that a) he'd have to present my work next Monday (this was news to me, I figured I still had one or two weeks) and b) he'd fire me if I didn't meet this deadline.

I made the deadline and quit two weeks later.

Grimalkine · 2015-02-10T20:49:12+00:00

Delivery driving, was asked by my boss to carry chemicals without a licence or training (which I had been asking for, for months), when I refused as here the driver not the company would be held responsible for any deaths or injuries in an accident, he sacked me. As I stood up I leaned over him and put my hand out. He was visibly shocked and nervous as he moved back in his chair. I took his hand shook it firmly and walked out. Not sure why I shook his hand tho.

TheKyleP · 2015-02-10T21:44:34+00:00

Not quite what you want but I think it relates.

I had a notoriously difficult female boss. I really respected her no nonsense approach but she was hard to work with when you got on her bad side.

We had a meeting with her and her 3 direct reports where we needed to discuss the yearly rating for our employees and make the case for why we wanted to rate anyone higher than average. I had done this with her before so i was ready for it. Another manager went first and got absolutely slaughtered. She was trying to rate her whole team to high as if they walk on water and had very few examples that were not basically their job.

So it came to me, boss is already wound up. My first two went fine as they had some high profile projects but then it came to a team supervisor who was really my go to person for anything I need. He made me look good at any opportunity so he's the type you want and need to go to bat for. Problem is she shrugged off all my examples and we fought back and forth on it with her stressing that's his job. We couldn't resolve there so she said we will take it to a 1:1.

In that one on one we did the same rounds in which i held by ground well beyond anything I ever had before I was passionate and unbending. It ended with me saying that if she forced me to give him a meets then I can only assume I'm getting a needs improvement. (A death blow to my career)

She said to give him the exceeds.

When I got my review a month later it was the highest rating possible. She said she really respected the way I stood up for my team. I was floored.... That was a big TRP transition moment for me. Later that year she gave me a big promotion and has continued to be a big fan of mine driving my success.

(I acknowledge one could simply classify this a professional development moment and no related to it being a female boss, but I really couldn't have expected such a positive response to me being so aggressive on the topic.)

Bigger_Than_Prince_ · 2015-02-10T17:48:29+00:00

This isn't a bad question, but your sample size on this sub might be diminished. If you want more response I'd post to askreddit. You can bring some findings back here if you want them analyzed using RP perspective. Obviously you'll need to stay within the rules of our community, but it's a solid topic.

redwormcharlie · 2015-02-10T19:24:58+00:00

The big one for me was when I worked for a prominent doctors office as IT and Insurance Billing.

The thing I hated the most would be that we would bill a certain diagnosis for a visit. That claim would come back denied as diagnosis not covered, or patient is out of benefits for that particular diagnosis. So the doctor would just write up a fake diagnosis for that day and we would resubmit with a new diagnosis billing code so the claim got paid, because god forbid they hold the crazy people responsible for their own benefits.

I wasn't fired for refusing to do that only, I got fired because I pissed all the women by scaring a co-worker by slamming paper work down on my desk in frustration. Outstanding open claims was another reason offered and the incident were reasons for my firing.

oldredder · 2015-02-11T14:35:19+00:00

Yes. Don't do it. The boss sets boundaries, the employee does not.

Title	Has setting up reasonable boundaries, telling a boss no, or refusing to act in an unethical way ever directly or indirectly gotten you fired?
Author	beware_the_syllogism
Upvotes	1
Comments	25
Date	February 10, 2015 2:27 PM UTC (11 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/askTRP
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/asktrp/comments/2vf3dv/has_setting_up_reasonable_boundaries_telling_a/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/askTRP/has-setting-up-reasonable-boundaries-telling-a.146072 https://theredarchive.com/post/146072

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