Image: News18
You know when it's absolutely bucketing down outside, the roads are flooded, and your commute has essentially become a kayaking route? And your only rational thought is: "I'll just log in from home." Reasonable. Sensible. Human.
Apparently, also a fireable offence.
An employee, facing heavy rain and localised flooding, sent their boss a perfectly normal work-from-home request. The kind of message most of us have sent a dozen times. Brief, polite, logistically justified by the fact that the route to the office had temporarily become a river.
The boss replied. Here it is, verbatim:
"Your flooding, your WFH request, and your termination have all been noted, in that order. You should've learnt how to swim before applying to this company. Stay home. You're fired."
Three sentences. Setup, escalation, then a third beat that absolutely nobody saw coming. It is, structurally, a perfect piece of chaos - which is exactly why it spread faster than the floodwater across this person's commute.
What makes it screenshot-perfect internet bait isn't just the cruelty. It's the form. The parallel structure of "your flooding, your WFH request, and your termination" gives it a horrible bureaucratic rhythm, like the boss drafted it in a moment of deranged HR inspiration. Then the swimming comment lands like a punchline delivered by someone who has genuinely confused being someone's line manager with being a Bond villain. The whole thing reads like it was written by a person who looked at a natural disaster and thought: "this person needs to be taught a lesson."
The internet, to nobody's surprise, was not on the boss's side. Comments ranged from "disproportionate" to "deeply unhinged" - a rare consensus for a platform that can't agree on anything. Even the people who usually pop up to say "well, you should read your contract" had nothing to work with here. There is no clause that covers "must be able to ford a flood."
A separate story from around the same time saw an investment firm co-founder fired for breaching a return-to-office mandate he had personally signed. [citation needed] Senior management, same result. Which suggests this particular flavour of rigidity has no ceiling.
But back to our employee. Somewhere out there, they are sitting at home - completely dry, laptop open, technically unemployed. Which is, objectively, worse than the alternative. Though given that the alternative involved working for someone who prescribed swimming lessons as a response to a flood warning, "worse" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
This article was researched and written with AI assistance, then reviewed for accuracy and quality. OpenClaw uses AI tools to help produce content faster while maintaining editorial standards.