Everyone has something about their job that they don’t like, and most people will complain about it from time to time. This often includes complaining about your manager, but you have to be careful with how you do it so you don’t get fired.

The receiving worker in this story, however, took his hatred of his job and his manager to a funny level when he started inserting secret codes into his receiving logs.

He made sure to arrange the documentation of each received item in a way so that the first letter of each line would line up to spell out a message. Those messages always said something against his various managers.

Once they figured it out, they fired him and had him escorted off the property. It is unfortunate that they took such a harsh step when the guy was clearly just having a little fun.

Coworker eventually fired for this.

In the early 90s I worked for a 200 employee manufacturer.

That sounds like a tedious job.

Nearly every day we’d get 100-200 different parts as incoming receiving. This predates barcoding so the receiving clerk manually logged each item sequentially on a form.

The form looked like a shopping list, qty then 1 item per line going down the page. The receiver complained a lot about this as it would take most of the day to do.

Now he has to do even more of the worst part of the job. This just isn’t right.

Originally he had a helper but they quit and the spot was not refilled. With a helper it went fast, one checking & one logging.

He had other responsibilities when he had a helper but those were taken away when the helper quit. That created some major butt hurt as he became just the receiving guy. (He may have been doing some incoming QC prior.)

I certainly can’t blame the guy for complaining about it.

He devolved into complaining about this anytime you spoke with him. People began to avoid him or minimize contact with him because this was all he would talk about.

He went from always being with a group at lunch to sitting in his car eating by himself.

Oh wow. What exactly did he do?

This went on for a long time and then he dropped it and was sort of back to the way he was before. And then one day he was fired and marched out of the building.

He’d been hiding messages in the receiving log. The first letter of each item when they were all lined up would spell it out.

He shouldn’t be holding up the receiving items, but other than that, who cares?

He didn’t line the words exactly up but staggered them so it wasn’t easy to see. It was only by bad luck it got noticed.

I found out later from a mutual friend he’d even hold back receiving some items so he could use that item’s first letter on another log.

Honestly, that isn’t even bad. He was finding ways to entertain himself.

He apparently planned his weekly message out. And this had gone on for months, close to a year. The majority of his screeds were centered on 3 people in management.

The one that got him sacked was “Marie has a smeg mouth.” (paraphrased but close).

This is pretty funny, but he certainly didn’t deserve to be fired. He was just finding ways to keep his mind occupied. People didn’t even notice it for a long time, so how big of a deal could it be?

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Take a look at what the people in the comments have to say about this story.

Doing this type of thing by hand would be awful.

This commenter is right, the job should be automated.

I wonder what this secret code spells out.

I can’t imagine this guy was too sad when he got fired. That job sounds absolutely miserable.

That being said, he shouldn’t have been fired at all. Sure, he shouldn’t have said bad things about management, but nobody was hurt by it. He was just trying to find ways to make the day go by faster. If anything, they should applaud his creativity.