Being rejected when you apply for a job is hard on most people but that is not as bad as the shock that hits you when you are fired while you have no plan for the future. Back in 2017, John Neuman, a disgruntled former employee showed up at his former workplace in Orlando, Florida, and started shooting at his former colleagues two months after he was fired. Five people lost their lives in the incident which the local police termed an execution. It is just one of the many cases of former employees who don’t take the news of their firing easily and who end up doing regrettable and sometimes tragic things. You have to keep a cool head and evaluate your options if you are fired to avoid ending up in the same shoes as these 10 people.
Deleting Donald Trump’s Twitter Account
Donald Trump was a real Twitter president and deleting his account even for a day was the best way to shut him down. Bahtoyar Duysak, the former Twitter employee was on his last day at work when he decided to deactivate the president’s account for 11 minutes. While Donald Trump called him a rogue employee, some people praised his actions saying he had done the world a favour. He later said it was a mistake and that he only deactivated the account because he got the notification that the account had been flagged for violations.
Stealing a train
Train companies rarely make the news unless something really terrible happens but one ex-employee of Vienna Line Transport in Austria did in 2017. The 36-year-old trolley driver got onto a tram-train while the driver was in the restroom and somehow managed to set it in motion. It is not clear why he chose that specific train but he made news when the driver called the company to report that his train had been stolen. The company switched off the electricity to bring the train to a stop before the suspect was arrested.
Destroying $60 million worth of vehicles with a bulldozer
The Mercedes luxury car plant in Vitoria, Spain woke up to horror when a former employee decided to take out his rage in the plant’s inventory. The incident happened back in 2021 when the employee stole a bulldozer from a construction site and drove it into the facility and started smashing through the luxury cars. By the time he was stopped by the security, he had rammed through more than 50 cars at the facility and was headed for the robotics manufacturing line. He was arrested for criminal damage for the losses estimated to be worth over $60 million.
Driving an 8-wheeler into the boss’s Ferrari
It happened in 2020 at a hauling company in Chicago where a trucker was angry when the boss told him that he had to leave. The angry trucker then asked the boss whether he was the owner of the GTC4Lusso Ferrari parked outside and when he received the confirmation, he said “now you will know what happens when you f*** with me,” before getting into his semi and driving for the $300K sports car. By the time the police arrived, the truck was safely parked on top of the car and there was nothing to salvage.
Ex-Manager Put Snapchat in trouble
Anthony Pompliano left Facebook and took up a managerial role in Snapchat’s global expansion office but was fired after a short time. In 2015, he filed a lawsuit against his former employers and in his lawsuit, he quoted the then CEO saying that the app was only for the rich people and not for poor countries such as Spain and India. That statement soon found its way onto social media causing an outcry that saw the app uninstalled all over the world as the company struggled to save face.
Giving away Marriot hotel rooms for $12
Juan Rodriguez was fired from Marriot in New York back in 2016 and wasn’t very happy with the company’s decision. He decided to get his revenge by giving away the hotel’s 3,000 rooms nearly for free. He hacked the reservation system and reduced the price from $159-499 per night to $12-59 per night. Many customers thought it was a joke and by the time the hotel chai discovered the hack, they had incurred losses of over $50,000. The modern day Robin Hood was later arrested because he forgot to hide his Ip address while carrying out the hack.
Deleting all of an Architectural company’s drawings
What do you do when you find your job advertised in the papers by your boss? Marie Lupe Cooley was in a similar situation when she found her job as an office assistant for an architectural firm in Jacksonville, Florida advertised in papers back in 2015. She decided to get ahead of her boss and sneaked into the office on a Sunday afternoon deleting all of the company’s blueprints which were worth over $2.5 million. She was arrested for the damages while her boss had to hire an expensive data recovery software company to retrieve the lost files. It was not necessary though because the boss was advertising for his wife’s company and her job was not on the line after all.
Setting the company’s headquarters on fire
Back in 2015, the headquarters of a food delivery business in Avondale, Chicago turned into a crime scene when a disgruntled former employee set it ablaze. The employee was allegedly angry with his former boss for unpaid wages and when he showed up with a container of gasoline, his former coworkers knew it was about to go ugly. He burnt down the office while the coworkers were still inside seriously injuring one worker in the process.
Ransoming the Google Account Password
Firing people in administration, especially IT guys is always hard because they have some of the most important details about the company. Triano Williams was the head of IT for the American College of Education. When the company laid him off in 2016, he refused to give back the password for a google account that stored all the academic records for the college’s 2,000 students. His lawyer told the college to pay him $200,000 before he would disclose that password. The college later took him to court where he was forced to pay more than that amount back to the college.
Smashing company cars with a hammer
Latasha Rena Bittle was fired from Smithfield Foods in 2021 but wasn’t comfortable with her dismissal. She drew attention to herself when she called her former employers and threatened her bosses. When she made good on her threats, she made it memorable. She came into the parking lot and smashed through the windows and windshields of five cars. She then proceeded to throw a jug full of accelerant into the worker’s break room but she left before adding arson to her list of accrued felonies.
