Programmer Bait

September 7, 2005

And we have a winner!!! A blog posting last month referred to an Internet contest wherein the winner would be the person who was fired from his or her job for the most outrageous or ridiculous reason, judged by a panel from Silicon Valley. Employment-related Internet start-up Simply Hired, through its affiliated Web site SimplyFired.com, solicited the stories of absurd firings; the reward would be a Caribbean cruise.

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Well, the grand-prize winner,�chosen from more than 1,000 entries,�is a computer engineer who lost his job for eating pizza (pepperoni, two slices).

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Jim Garrison, who lives in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, ate two of the six pieces of pepperoni pizza left over from a meeting involving a different group within the company.

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He didn’t realize that some of the other employees of this potluck had already decided to take the leftover pizza home with them.

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When they discovered one-third of the leftover pizza pie had been eaten, the employees reported Garrison to management, ultimately leading to his firing last November.

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He found out�a month after the sinister snacking incident.

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In Garrison’s words:�

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... I had been working for a mortgage company as a developer for 18 months and things were going well. Then, one day I saw that a different group in my company had just finished up a pot-luck and had some pizza left over. I thought they would probably end up throwing it away and I was kind of hungry so I went for it ... I took a slice of pizza.

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Apparently the employees who threw this pot luck were planning to take it home and were offended by my action. Now I thought we were all basically on the same team and if someone didn't like what I did they would tell me so and I would apologize and maybe offer to pay for the pizza. These employees ended up telling their manager, who told her vice president about what I did.

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The worst part about this is that I wasn't told about any of this until a month after the incident. No warning, no second chance.

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I know that I left an impression because to this day my former coworkers refer to unattended pizza as "programmer bait".

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Runners-up included a furniture mover who got fired after he and a co-worker were caught fencing with some adult sex toys found in a customer’s bedroom; a software developer who incorporated the word “STUPID” (yes, all CAPS) into an error-code message; and a warehouse worker found doing naughty things with the prosthetics made by his employer.

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DRB