Imagine working at a company as a receptionist, and you’re specifically told not to make coffee for the salesmen. They are supposed to make their own coffee. If a salesman asked you to make coffee, would you do it, or would you follow the rules?

In this story, one woman is in a situation like this, and she follows the rules. What happens next is bad news followed by good news.

Let’s read the whole story.

You are fired for obeying my rules, please stay until we can replace you though

It was 2005 and the lady I had met over the Internet, having visited me in Australia and me visiting her in the USA and meeting her folks and all that, she had now come to be with me and we had married.

But since arriving to stay she had had a lot of problems as her Vocational College Degree was not recognised in Australia, leaving her with difficulties getting a job.

She was determined and flexible though and did some temp jobs, clerical, receptionist kind of things, using skills she had leaned while working at college as a librarian.

She finally got a ‘real’ job as a receptionist/clerk at a company that brokered loans and she got on with things.

There was a rule about making coffee.

One thing that was always a problem was that sales rep/sharks would have their clients come in and they would tell the women to make coffees for them.

That wasn’t part of their role.

So my wife and co-workers were told that they were not to do that, it was up to the salesperson to make the coffee for themselves and clients. This was part of an initiative to try to retain women in these roles as they didn’t tend to say long in what was something of an anarchic office.

Doing what she was told to do really backfired.

So my wife is working and a salesman’s (they called them Financial advisors but they were the credit business version of the used car salesman class), client comes in and she buzzed the guy.

He comes out and says to her to make them both coffees.

She tried to be discrete but said that he knew she couldn’t do that.

He blew up, went to her Supervisor and she told my wife to make the coffees. Later she had her in the office and fired her !

But she wasn’t really fired exactly.

Yep she was fired for trying to do as she was told, the opposite of malicious I guess, but the Karma comes in anyway.

She was fired but asked to stay on until they got another person to replace her !

For the next two months she continued to go to work, now able and ready to refuse anything she didn’t want to do, especially the coffee making.

The same guy tried once, she said no, so fire me. lol

They could NOT find a replacement, word of their issues at that company had got around the receptionist/clerical field locally.

That’s so weird. I’ve never heard of firing an employee but asking them to keep working.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person knows what it’s like to work for a company like the one in this story.

Here’s another story about getting fired.

Yup. This is basically what happened.

No, I don’t think this is the way things usually work.

You shouldn’t get fired for following the rules.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a rude customer who got exactly what they wanted in their pizza.