news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050903/ap_on_fe_st/funny_firings
AP Man Fired for Eating Pizza Wins Contest By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP Business Writer Fri Sep 2, 8:12 PM ET SAN FRANCISCO - A computer engineer who lost his job because he ate two p ieces of pepperoni pizza left over from a company meeting has been named the winner of an offbeat Internet contest that solicited stories about outrageous firings.
A panel of Silicon Valley judges assembled by Simply Hired, a Mountain Vi ew startup that sponsored the contest, picked Jim Garrison's strange tal e from more than 1,000 entries submitted during the past month. The reward: a free Caribbean cruise that will include passengers famously fired by Donald Trump on his popular television show, "The Apprentice." The runners-up included these bizarre stories: a furniture mover who got fired after he and a co-worker were caught fencing with some adult sex t oys that they found in a customer's bedroom; a worker who misunderstood a manager's instructions to send some sensitive data to microfilm and e- mailed it to a "Michael Finn" instead; and a warehouse worker found doin g perverse things with the prosthetics made by his employer. Then again, he never dreamed he woul d be fired after he ate two of the six pieces of pepperoni pizza left ov er from a company meeting. Although he didn't work in the department that held the meeting where the pizza was served, Garrison figured it was fair game since the company h ad bought it and it looked like it was going to be wasted if it wasn't e aten. What he didn't know is that several other employees had already wo rked out a plan to take the leftover pizza home with them. 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 a month after he ate the food. "If somebody had warned me, I would have been happy to pay for the pizza, " Garrison said. On the advice of Simply Hired, Garrison declined to identify his former e mployer other than to say it's a large mortgage company. He is now happi ly employed as a programmer at a satellite TV company, but he still thin ks twice about eating any leftovers sitting around the office.
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