OK put this up on the anti-work FB group but wanted to share here as well as I am sure you all have your own stories/can relate. I have worked in a TON of toxic shitholes but this particular place took the cake (or the apple, as it were; read on…):
Okay, so I'm going to one-up another post here for “stupidest reason you ever got fired.” A zillion years ago during the dotcom bubble, I worked at a certain large publishing interest. They had an office in NYC but once or twice a week I had to commute via Metro North to their tax-loophole corporate campus up-river. That involved getting up at the ass crack of dawn and praying that there weren't any delays, because the shuttle that took you from the station to the campus only ran 2x n the AM and then 2x in the PM. Worst of all, my boss sometimes deliberately scheduled us to have to be in NYC in the AM and upstate later for an afternoon meeting, so we'd be stuck getting cabs to the office (and frequently, back, if we had to work past the last shuttle). There was also no place to get food on campus except for the cafeteria which you guessed it was open for like half an hour in the AM and half an hour around lunch, which we were always booked for. There was no fridge at the upstate office to store food in.
My boss was a no-balls tool who never stood up for his team and kowtowed to every stupid content idea that his superiors had, no matter how awful it looked or how non-implementable it was (also related to why he dragged us up for half days; he didn't have the balls to explain the logistics to HIS boss on why it would be easier to have us call into the half hour meeting that would take us four hours round trip to get to). Anyway, the campus had absolutely GORGEOUS grounds that of course we never had time to visit…and it included a legacy apple orchard that was untended, and had benches for folks to sit, etc. From the beginning of August until late into October the trees were always HEAVY with apples. Canada geese and deer ate them. Anyway, after one of the “split” days where I hadn't eaten since 6 AM, and had missed the shitty cafeteria's hours due to my tool boss, I took my mandatory half-hour lunch break outside at around 4 PM. It was a gorgeous day. I wandered into the orchard with my book and…ate an apple off of the tree. One of the security guards drives by in his little golf cart, stops, says nothing, and keeps going.
The VERY NEXT DAY I am called to No Dick Boss's office about…wait for it…theft of company property. I shit you not. Apparently, ONE DAY A YEAR, the cafeteria picked up whatever ripe apples there were and gave them out, ONE PER PERSON. I asked what happened to the rest of the apples — I mean, the ground was literally carpeted with rotting apples on the warm September day that I had taken one. The trees were heavy with fruit. Some of the branches had even broken off from the weight of the fruit. Yellowjackets were having parties on mounds of rotting fruit. Apparently they waited for enough rotting apples to pile up and then they would tell the groundskeeper to just throw them out once they really started to stink. Yet, it was “theft” for me to take an apple because it wasn't Free Apple Day and I didn't get my apple handed to me by a Cafeteria Person. I then tried to use the opportunity to explain WHY the apple was the only thing that I had eaten since dawn that day, and how split days were a massive waste of time, he shut me down explaining that it was “just part of the corporate culture to have all meetings in person.”
A week later, I was let go for “not being a good fit” after privately reporting a totally unrelated incident to HR and HR turned around and squealed to my boss., and when they tried to screw me on a severance package I blew up Dickhead Boss right in front of the head of HR and Legal and threatened to sue them for I don't even remember what I said at the time but all of a sudden I got 4 months severance and a year of paid for medical insurance instead of 4 weeks and COBRA. In a way, the whole thing was a metaphor for toxic capitalism — acres and ACRES of apples going to waste and rotting, under our noses, while being told that we could only have one and only if it was handed to us at a specific time and place. No regrets that they laid me off; the fuckers also refused to even THINK about comping us our cab fare on the split days anyway and I got a new job elsewhere less than a week later. Toolboy also got laid off a few months later so all his ass-kissing was for nothing.
Let me add that it grated on me and still does to this day that this same company was all virtue-signally RE giving to charities (they had one of those stupid fucking mandatory United Way drives every year) but not once did they think to actually give all of those apples to a food bank or something. Pardon my potty mouth, hence the NSFW….