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 television 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 scrolling through all the postings on Simplyfired.com.
Garrison, who lives in Highlands Ranch, Colo., said he never thought he would be rewarded for getting fired. Then again, 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 where the pizza was served, Garrison figured it was fair game since the company had bought it and 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 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 employer other than to say it's a large mortgage company. He is now happily employed as a programmer at a satellite TV company, but he still thinks twice about eating any leftovers sitting around the office.
Where I work, if any food is left over from a meeting, it goes in the breakroom. Once there, it is fair game. Otherwise, drop the food. Although, firing? That is a bit too harsh, and I'd love to see him seek some sort of legal recourse for that.
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