Fired for eating pizza, man wins contest
September 5, 2005
BY MICHAEL LIEDTKE
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SAN FRANCISCO -- A computer engineer who lost his job because he ate two pieces 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 View startup that sponsored the contest, picked Jim Garrison's strange tale 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 TV show, "The Apprentice."
Garrison, 39, prevailed over some tough competition.
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 toys 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 doing perverse things with the prosthetics made by his employer.
It made for such fascinating reading that one woman posted an account about how she got fired for spending too much company time on Simplyfired.com.
'I would have been happy to pay'
Garrison, who lives in Highlands Ranch, Colo., said he never dreamed he would be fired after he ate two of the six pieces of pepperoni pizza left over from a company meeting.
Although he didn't work in the department that held the meeting, Garrison figured the food was fair game since it looked like it was going to be wasted if it wasn't eaten. What he didn't know is that several other employees had already worked out a plan to take the leftover pizza home.
When they discovered one-third of the leftover pizza had been eaten, the employees reported Garrison to management, leading to his firing last November.
"If somebody had warned me, I would have been happy to pay for the pizza," Garrison said.
Garrison declined to identify his former employer. He is now happily employed as a programmer at a satellite TV company.
On the Web:
www.simplyfired.com
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