A gen Z tech employee has detailed how she was unexpectedly fired – after a 20-second mistake she made during a work meeting.
Michelle, from the US, captured a seemingly innocent TikTok video of herself after she accidentally spilled coffee over her counter because she’d forgotten to put a mug underneath the machine.
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But the 24-year-old remote worker had uploaded the footage – without realizing that her viewers could potentially hear the content of her meeting, which was on in the background.
Just 24 hours after she posted her video, she was pulled into a meeting with HR and her chief product officer informing her that they were “immediately dismissing” her for “gross negligence”.
“I got fired from my six-figure remote tech job because I posted a TikTok video on the internet,” she said in her now-viral TikTok video.
“They canned me… it was all because of a TikTok.
“I took a quick snippet of the coffee everywhere, I turned around my face and (screamed), ‘F***’ (at the camera). I hit stop recording and I uploaded it.
“I did not use my big giant brain to think about the fact that, in the background of that video, you can hear my chief product officer talking… because I was in a meeting.”
Michelle decided to make herself a coffee while the meeting was running from 4.30am one morning in August.
“I was in my weekly team stand-up meeting,” she said.
“They were having a conversation that had absolutely nothing to do with me so I went off camera, took the 20-second video and hit upload.
“At the same time, I was actually sitting in a meeting at 4.30am and I didn’t realize when I uploaded the video that in the background of my video, you can actually hear my work meeting going on.
“And I didn’t think anything of it until the next day.”
‘Holy s***’
The following day, she was called into a meeting.
“They said, ‘Hey, someone sent us this video and we are immediately dismissing you from the company for gross negligence’,” she recalled.
Lost for words, Michelle quietly responded, “It was great working with all of you” before she hung up the call.
“I thought, ‘Holy s***’,” she said.
Speaking about the video in question, she insisted: “They weren’t talking (in the meeting) about anything super confidential.
“You can honestly barely hear them in the background, but alas they found it to be a fireable offense and so they canned me,” she said.
“I have nothing else to do but accept it, I f***ed up. It was an oversight, I would 100 percent accept that, they canned me, I can’t do anything about it.”
Michelle said she took the video down upon the company’s request after being viewed just 2,500 times.
In another video, Michelle said she enjoyed working for the company and was given a pay rise just two weeks earlier, so she was blindsided by the termination.
Despite losing the job after eight months of employment, Michelle said there was a silver lining.
“So of course, I thought, ‘What would any college dropout who got fired from their job do next?'” she asked herself.
“I’m going to start my own company.”
‘Sign from the universe’
The young woman said she had always wanted to start her own business but had never found the right time.
“The night before (I was fired), someone said to me, ‘You should go full time and launch this company’,” she recalled.
“And I was like, ‘No I have a sweet gig’… 12 hours later, canned.
“I was like, ‘F***, if that isn’t a sign from the universe, I don’t know what is.'”
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