Ever been accused of something you didn’t do? Did it drive you nuts? I know when happens to me, it makes my blood boil. Luckily, I can’t recall it ever happening to me at work – I only get it from every single other person in my life.

Anyhow, these AskReddit users haven’t been so lucky. Read on to find out about how they were accused of bizarre things they didn’t do in the workplace.

1. “Stealing trash”

I had an employer of mine write me up for stealing trash. In reality, at the end of my shift, one of my duties was to gather all the trash. Often times, I would pick through the trash and sort all the paper, pop cans, and water bottles in our company’s recycle bin. We had a special promotion with our trash company in which our company would get money based on the number of pounds we recycled. It ended up being $1500 per month AND we didn’t pay our trash bill.

So long story short, I got a final write up for stealing company time for sorting our recyclables. So I stopped, the following month, our manager was pissed that she had to pay a trash bill. She called the trash company and the company told her that the past 2 years she didn’t pay for trash because our company would recycle so much, we would get a $1500 check AND free trash service.

My boss thought that the checks were a bonus for her. Anyhow, the district manager was reviewing the write ups and saw I got written up for stealing trash, so he called me up and asked me what was going on. I told him the story about the trash company and their promotion. He congratulated me for a job well done.

The next day he flew in to talk to my manager. He asked my manager what happened to the $20,000 that she got from the trash company. Apparently, she tried to pin it back on me, and our district manager promptly fired her. After escorting her out, he called me into the office. He told me what happened in that meeting, and offered me a promotion to Assistant Manager.

2. Psycho

Several years ago, I was working for a sporting good store as the customer service desk guy. Mostly what I did was returns and some special stuff with Ticketmaster and hunting/fishing licenses. While it wasn’t a glamorous job, I liked it because I’m an outdoors guy, and so the cliental were fun to talk to. One day, we were informed we were getting a new general manager, as the old one (decent guy, but distant) was being transferred. The new manager was a raving harpy. She enjoyed making employees upset, didn’t give a shit about our customers, did nothing to improve anything about the store, and kept the other managers in her office with endless meetings about “improving” the store. After a few months of this, and seeing some of the high school girls hired to work in shoes crying after her ranting at them, I had enough. I wrote a rather eloquent letter to corporate about her behavior and actions, and had several employees sign it. Two days later, several regional higher-ups arrived, and proceeded to chew her out big time. She was suspended for two weeks, and told that if the store didn’t improve within the next quarter, she’d be fired.

But that’s just the beginning of the story, dear reader. I thought I had won. But no, I had not. Apparently, she found out it was me who wrote the letter (probably got told by one of the other employees, I’m not sure) and wanted revenge. So she got into the computer system, and started to fake records showing I had been selling gift cards to myself, pocketing the cash difference, and then buying merchandise with those cards (mostly candy/pop/small stuff, which she was probably pocketing since our counts weren’t ever off).

She then called in loss prevention, who weren’t doing their jobs too well, because they didn’t look closely at the files and their “last edited” dates (Yay for WinNT Office!!) because they believed it and called in the county sheriffs. Two deputies came, looked over the evidence (to their credit, they asked “Are you sure?” and “Can you explain this?” several times, and I got the feeling hey were unsure about the whole mess. Nice guys, too, they offered to take me out through the back instead o parading me past customers, let me have a cigarette before we left, and were generally courteous and respectful) and ended up arresting me on felony theft charges. Taken to jail, booked, the whole she-bang. I was in tears for pretty much three days. But I knew this was shit, so I go my parents to help hire a lawyer for me. Told him the whole story, and said under no circumstance were we pleading out to anything. He said ok, and set up a meeting with the DA to talk about motions and such. When we arrived, the DA was all smiles and very polite. He informed me that the paperwork wasn’t quite done yet, but that they were dropping all charges, and filing False Report charges against my old manager. The investigators had looked over the evidence, and found that A) the files for almost 3 months worth of “thefts” had all been edited on two days, both of which I had not been present for, but that she had, B) they had all been edited from her computer, a computer I did not have access too, and C) several of the “thefts” occurred on days when I was in the system as being out of state on vacation.

I felt a lot happier after that, and felt even better when my ex-boss was found to have fled the state, and checked herself into a mental hospital for a “nervous breakdown.” She was eventually brought back, charged, and convicted. Last I saw she was an assistant manager at a gas station, while I’m now a federal firefighter and in school to become a police officer (and will make damn sure I read over every bit of evidence put in front of me). It’s only after I saw her pumping gas that I could claim victory over her.

3. “I cried for days”

I worked in a souvenir shop at an amusement park. It was the fourth of July, one of the busiest days because of the park’s fireworks show. We were also understaffed. The shop was just inside the gate, so it would get swamped just before closing, as people bought the stuff they didn’t want to walk around with all day.

I was left alone in the shop just before closing time running the cash register as people flowed in. It was utter chaos. While closing out the register that night, it was noticed that a large stuffed animal had been stolen.

The manager simply could not fathom that one person manning a swamped store can’t prevent theft because not all the displays are within sight of the register. I think it must have been a team effort, with one or two people getting my attention in one area while the other walked off with the toy, but I didn’t say that because I really didn’t know when or how it happened. Accused me of being in on it and looking the other way while a friend stole it so we could profit later. I didn’t even know what to say.

I was 17, it was my first job, and I cried for days under the assumption that every job I’d ever hold would be like that one.

4. Best Buy

DVDs/Video Games were really more my wheelhouse. But I worked where they told me and I did my job well.

During Christmas season, it got really busy so everyone was running around helping every department. I was hanging out in my own section when a woman comes over, asks about some headphones, and I help her. She then asks me if the Dance Dance Revolution Madcatz (?) mat she bought for her daughter is any good and I ask if she has any of the games (she didn’t) and showed her a slightly more expensive (but better) copy of a Konami mat with a game. She thanked me since she didn’t even know it needed a game and went off.

My department manager comes up behind me, tells me to meet him in the breakroom in five minutes, and -rips- in to me. He says that the department with the best revenue gets bonuses (only true for him, not for the rest of us below him) and we shouldn’t be helping customers in other sections get more expensive things. He says he’d be shocked if I made it past the winter. I just say “Yes, sir” and go back to work.

Come January, I get fired by “department manager recommendation.” So, when you go to Best Buy, know that all the departments have their own agendas with you.

5. Dummy

My first job with the state was awful. My supervisor was an idiot in every sense of the word. I remember once, I was called into a meeting with our bureau chief. He asked us some questions about office matters, and my supervisor flat out made up lies about me that were completely against my character. I couldn’t hold in my frustration and blew up at her, told my bureau chief I wasn’t there to play childish games, and then walked out of the meeting. I ended up winning that one, and got a promotion that paid twice as much as that terrible supervisor. It was one of those awesome revenge moments where nobody got hurt.

6. Sleazeball

Back when I was in high school, I worked for my town’s parks dept. One time, my boss (who was a total sleazeball who harassed every girl there, and hated me mostly for not being female) calls me in to his office. While there, he accuses me of stealing a $3 check, and then says that I have to be let go. I tell him point-blank that if I was to steal from the dept, it would be something a lot more than a measly 3 dollar check (what the hell would I do with that anyway?). Later on, I find out from a friend of mine that he found the check underneath his desk, and then a month later someone finally reported him for harassment and he got fired too.

7. This is war

Money. An old manager before I ended up working in government accused me of stealing from a till at a little convenience store I worked at as a supervisor. I ended up suspended and paraded through the store by my boss and his boss as a criminal when they “Escorted me off the premises” and told me they’d be in touch. So I was on suspension with pay until they decided to investigate this fully. I happily had quite a few beers as it was a Friday night when they suspended me and started searching for new jobs…

My manager called me up on Saturday morning (eurgh, hangover) and called me in… he then slated at me ‘bullying’ charges from other members of staff, his boss no-where to be seen and told me “I can send these charges up the chain of command…” (Yes he used those words) “… or you can hand your notice in and leave now.” I was 19… pissed off at my treatment by this manager since he’d taken over so I thought “to hell with you and your company” went home, wrote my notice and handed it in with the understanding of “All your holiday will be paid and you won’t need to work the notice period” (Never got it in writing). In hindsight I should have asked to look at those charges and fucked him from there but it takes a long winded part here. I left the company and expected my last month’s pay-packet as agreed with my boss when I handed the notice in…

…behold the pay-packet of £910 short-fined for “Not working notice”. I go back to see my old boss who rapidly avoids me… and hides in the office. I speak to the assistant manager who lets me into the back store to have a chat with the manager, he tells me to leave or he’ll call the police. Old assistant manager gets involved and lets me in the back-door (shut it Reddit) when he isn’t there to have a look at some records. Asshole never had charges there, never put my notice in and got it classified as AWOL. The charge he got me with originally? A till that was £32.12 down…

War. I went in all guns blazing with this back-up and a letter from my third-cousin (She works in law) that basically he gives me the cash or he’s fucked. This is after a long drawn out “You give me the cash and this goes no further ultimatum from me” AFTER I’ve started work at my new place making nice dosh… it’s the principle. He avoids it and thinks I’ve got nothing until I give him this letter from my cousin. He hands me £750 out of the secure safe… Yep, the money had been going walk about somewhere and into someone’s pocket … but it certainly wasn’t mine. It was his. I made sure that he gave me the cash in the store-room with my back to the camera in there. Said thank you and was on my merry way home… but a quick call to HR made sure they’d view that footage just now…

Two months later I pop in as I need some beers for a party and my old assistant manager pulls me to the side to have a quiet word. Turns out the manager had stolen £28K worth of goods and money from the company. He got taken to court, prosecuted and lost everything. Funny thing is two years later where I’m working his name comes up on the unemployment benefit register over here and I sit there with a smug grin knowing that asshole got caught and lost everything all because of his lack of integrity.

8. “Dedicated to the cause”

A year after I started working for a company as a graphic designer (turned out I was also the marketing and web design departments as well) my wife got pregnant with our first child. This was an office filled mostly with middle aged women (I was in my mid-late twenties) and they were all excited, even threw us a baby shower.

All goes well and my son is born and I take 2 weeks vacation time to be with my wife and child (2 weeks I had saved up). I come back and my boss is suddenly very aloof and non-communicative with me where previously she and I were pretty close.

This goes on for several months until I learn budget cuts have eliminated my position effective in 6 months from the time I found out. Through my co-workers I found out that my boss was pissed I had a baby and that I “wasn’t dedicated to the cause”. She was also at the budget meeting and initially there were no cuts to our division but she threw me under the bus saying my work was non-essential.

So here I am with a young family and staring down the barrel of unemployment. Turns out though that another company had been following my work and were eager to sign me on. Needless to say I didn’t do shit for the next 6 months and am now happy at my current position and making more moolah to boot. Their company is now in trouble and I poached one of their biggest clients on the way out.

9. Water

I’m on a diet that requires me to drink a metric ton of water so I carry around a 1L Nalgine bottle at all times.

I’m a mid-level manager at a 60 person company. At the end of the work day, on my way out I pass the water cooler and fill my bottle up for the commute home. Yesterday I was doing just that when our office manager walked up and said the following: “You’re leaving for the day, water is for employee’s to drink when they are working in the office only” I laughed it off, finished filling my bottle and headed home.

I thought she was kidding, or at the very worst having a shitty day and lashing out, she wasn’t. Today I get into the office with an email from her to myself, my boss (our CEO/founder), and our HR person saying that I am stealing from the company, that I didn’t stop filling my water bottle and immediately apologize when confronted, and that she is officially reporting this behavior and asking to have it documented.

Needless to say we all had a pretty good laugh about it, my boss called me in hysterics and could barely form a sentence he was laughing so hard, and someone wrote “Is proper hydration good for the company?” on my water bottle. Our office manager, however is just walking by my office and glaring this morning.

10. “Bringing down”

I was accused of “bringing down” my entire department of 40+ people for what the folks in charge consider “excessive internet usage.” Let me explain.

My company is very strict as to what sites you can and cannot visit on the intranet (I actually just found out last week that Reddit is ok :). Anyway, apparently every time you go to a site that isn’t considered work related the site you go to is logged as well as the amount of bandwidth it “wastes”. Some other sites just get banned altogether and are usually sites that stream videos, porn, gambling, stuff like that. Up until last year I had a subscription to Sirius radio which included an internet subscription. So one day I tried to get on Sirius to see if it could be streamed and, to my surprise/delight, I could not only access the site, but also the radio feature. So for 2 weeks I was streaming Sirius non-stop during my 8 hour workday. Fast forward to the Monday after those two weeks are up and I get a phone call from the head of my department asking me to come into her office. I figured it can’t be all that bad as she and I speak on an almost regular basis. So I try to log onto Sirius before I go to her office and it won’t. In fact, I can’t even access the site now. I didn’t think anything of it until I went into my meeting. Apparently the company chief technology officer contacted the head of my department and told her that I myself was the NUMBER ONE “abuser” of non work-related internet usage for that particular month. Evidently I used 2.8gigs of bandwidth just from streaming music.

I was given a pretty serious pep talk and was told that my actions not only hurt myself but also the entire department is now suffering because of me. I was also told that my department is lucky to even still be existing after what I’ve done and that if she had her way in regards to the incident i’d never work here again. Thankfully all that happened was I was put on final warning (step 3 in the 3 step warning process before being canned) and that my non work related internet was blocked for a month. Well not one week later I found a job in a different department and that written warning went away. Needless to say my boss was furious.

11. Murderer!

I once used the phrase “more than one way to skin a cat” around a manager who had never heard the phrase. She called me into her office later to ask why I was saying such disgusting things, accused me of being a sicko who kills animals, and then threatened to fire me if she heard anything like it ever again.

12. Juggling

I worked in retail as a cashier at a pet store for a long time, and occasionally when there was nothing going on I would just grab a couple tennis balls and juggle them to keep myself amused. I’m pretty good at it, can do 3 in all sorts of weird ways without looking at it or thinking about it so I converse with customers perfectly normally when I need to, and most of them find it funny (if I didnt think they would I’d stop before they even made it close to conversation range, and I’d done it long enough that I was a pretty good judge of that kind of thing).

Cue a day such as that, I’m bored and juggling while I watch the front door. Family comes in with little kids, they laugh at the juggling and come talk to me for a little while about reptiles (and juggling) while I try to teach one of their sons (5 or 6 years old) how to juggle because he asked me to. Good times were had by all, they walk off and do their shopping with their little son trying to juggle the mini tennis balls I gave him.

Immediately get called into the back by the assistant manager who (with another manager present as a witness I guess) decides he’s going to rip me a new one for being disrespectful to the customers by juggling and not giving them my full attention. I respectfully (perhaps sarcastically, no promises) disagree, and when he looks to the other manager in the room to back him up you could just tell the guy was completely uninterested in getting involved, and he basically had nothing bad to say. Assistant manager continues to lay into me a bit more, says he’s going to work with me on not being disrespectful like that and if it continued we’d have to have a talk about my employment, I leave.

Month later, new store manager gets hired, walks to the front with the assistant manager and sees me juggling. Assistant manager gets the look like he’s about to rip me a new one, but the store manager laughs, compliments me on my juggling, goes and grabs his own tennis balls and starts juggling too. Ah man, the look on the assistant managers face…priceless.

13. Paranoia

I work in sales and my co-worker, who is quite paranoid, accused me of going in and making returns on his sales and the transferring the sales to my name… Which is complete shit. He was just trying to save face when he realized that most of his customers were actually returning their product because he had done a horrible job of getting them the right sizes, colors, etc… He was fired shortly afterward for incompetence.

14. Salad Thief

I got accused of stealing a salad. I worked as a cashier at a grocery store while in high school. Because they had scheduled me 6 1/2 hours, I only qualified for a 15 minute break, not a 30 minute. So I spend the first 8 or so minutes of my break on the phone with a mechanic working out issues with my car. I then run back to the little cafe near the back of the store that has a salad bar and make a quick salad, which you weigh and price there. By this time I had about 5 minutes left on break, and the manager was very strict about not going over your 15 minutes.

So I stand at the cafe register for a good minute, and no one is to be found. I quickly eat my salad, and then take the sticker up to the front registers to pay for the $1.99 salad. I go back on the clock, and about 20 minutes later I am called into the office. They say a situation has occurred, but don’t tell me what. They said they are sending me home for the day.

So I come back in the next day for my shift, and they call me into the office again. In the office is the store manager, the assistant manager, the office manager, the cafe manager, and my shift supervisor. Mind you I am a 16 year old kid at their first job who had never been in any sort of trouble. They accuse me of stealing the salad because “despite purchasing the salad, as our records do indicate, you consumed the salad before the purchase.” I explained to them how the cashier at the cafe was nowhere to be found, and how if I wanted to eat during my break at that point, I would have had to eat it back in the cafe and then pay for it up front. They tell me to go home, and that they will contact me tomorrow regarding if I keep my job or not. I left in tears, but then got really angry at the severe overreaction, so I came back in an hour later and told them I quit.

15. “Stubborn old goat”

I briefly worked at a cooking school, doing some admin work during the days and helping out with the classes in the evening. The owner was an old-fashioned stubborn old goat who refused to modernize in anyway (unimportant except for background on character). I was in working, on a bank holiday, so nobody was phoning in to book classes because everybody thought we were closed. So i’m sorting dishes and putting them away when my boss says, from across the room, that he’s going out for lunch and that I could go home when I was finished. Great, I think, I’m bored out of my mind. I finish my stuff and go home.

I run into him on the stairs on the way out and cheerfully say that I’m finished everything and that I’m going home now. He looks vaguely puzzled and says ok.

The next morning I get a phone call where he asks me ‘what happened yesterday?’ I’m running through every phone call I made the day before wondering if there was some sort of a problem with a customer that I forgot to mention. I can’t think of anything and ask what he means. He says ‘why did you leave?’ I reply it’s because he said that I could go home when I was done my work. He says, no he didn’t say that. I apologize for mishearing him.

And here’s where it gets really, unbelievably stupid. He just keeps repeating over and over how he never said that and that I was making it up and that he had more work for me to do in the afternoon. He tells me to come into the office later.

I’m confused and pissed at this point because, has he never heard of a misunderstanding before? And if he had more work for me to do, why in the hell didn’t he say anything when I ran into him in the stairway on the way out?

I get there and he says very somberly that he had thought about it and had to let me go because I was a liar and he couldn’t have untrustworthy people working for him. I said that’s fine because I didn’t want to work for anyone so rigid, who couldn’t fathom that his words could be misheard.

I couldn’t even report him to the labour bureau or anything because I was working in the UK illegally.

16. They had your name on them…

I’ve been accused of stealing pens. Sadly, the pens I stole actually had my name on them (as a then recent high school graduate, I received multiple Cross pens with my name etched on them). However, according to the super-sleuth, this was likely due to me etching it on while in the office in an effort to steal the pens. Yay for management!

17. Flash drive

I had been working an IT job for about a year. This new guy starts, and on his second day he accuses me of stealing a flash drive off his desk. I tell him I haven’t seen it, to which he replies “Well it didn’t just walk off by itself now, did it?!” I pointed out that he had left our office without locking it or even shutting the door, which is against our security procedures that were outlined in his orientation that was just the day before. He complained to the CEO (smallish company, about 100 employees), and an hour later found the flash drive on the ground by his desk. He had knocked it off with his coffee mug.

18. “It made no sense”

I work in the stock room of a major retail store at a mall. I was accused of not properly putting clothes into our shelves and instead just throwing them on top the shelf. The person who reported me was an overnight worker. I don’t work overnight. Needless to say, the accusation got turned over because it made no sense.