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Five weirdest stories of job hate

Sometimes, people get revenge on their workplace -- and sometimes their workplace gets revenge on them. We're not sure which of these descriptions best fits a man's bizarre car crash into the Boulder restaurant where he worked on Monday -- more on that below. But it got us thinking about...
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Sometimes, people get revenge on their workplace -- and sometimes their workplace gets revenge on them. We're not sure which of these descriptions best fits a man's bizarre car crash into the Boulder restaurant where he worked on Monday -- more on that below. But it got us thinking about other stories of employees who said goodbye to their job in memorable ways. Check out our favorites below, complete with links to previous coverage. Number 5: "Jennifer Gomes, PE teacher, allegedly left bomb threat because she didn't want to be at school." It's a temptation pretty much every student has felt -- the urge to make a bomb threat because of an impending test or an awful assignment or the feeling that there was something more important to do than go to school.

Example: In 2011, someone put a note on the door of Escuela de Guadalupe School reading, "There is a bomb inside."

The twist? The person accused was Jennifer Gomes, the school's P.E. teacher. She later admitting to doing so to police, because she wasn't that into going to work that day.

We've been there, Jennifer. But most of us sucked it up and went anyway.

Continue to keep counting down our five weirdest stories of work revenge. Number 4: "Pissed-Off Oddfellows Employee Was Caught On Camera Stealing $1,000 From Restaurant's Safe."

This one comes from the Dallas Observer, our sister paper. Last fall, the Observer reports, an employee of Oddfellows, a suburban restaurant, was reprimanded for poor performance and assigned a different task.

But according to a police report quoted by the Observer, "Apparently the suspect did not agree with the supervisor and walked into the back storage where the safe was located, opened the safe door, and took the money."

Quite a bit of money, too: $1,096. Problem is, the whole thing was caught by a camera pointed directly at the safe.

Not exactly the perfect crime.

Continue to keep counting down our five weirdest stories of work revenge. Number 3: The parking place chosen by Daniel Chaires

At about 2:46 a.m. on Monday, the Boulder Daily Camera reports, a car pulled up to BJ's Restaurant & Brewhouse, one of Boulder's most popular watering holes.

And then the vehicle pulled into it.

Police say Daniel Chaires, a BJ's employee, appears to have purposefully driven his car into the eatery's entrance, wiping out its revolving door in the process. Upon their arrival, cops found him "lounging" behind the wheel -- the seat back, his hands behind his head. Just chillin'.

In the police report cited by the Camera, Chaires didn't say he had crashed into the place because he was angry or upset. Indeed, he insisted that he didn't want to hurt anyone -- and he admitted being on an unnamed drug at the time. So it's possible Chaires' actions don't fit our revenge motif.

Then again, we wouldn't want to bet against it.

Continue to keep counting down our five weirdest stories of work revenge. Number 2: "Joseph Kern: Is he a schmuck for back-wages lawsuit against restaurant he allegedly robbed?"

This incident is a variation on the theme that dominated our fourth pick, above. But then it goes off into an inspired improvisation.

Joseph Kern worked for CP Burger in Aspen -- but this last October, he was caught on camera stealing around $2,000 from the company safe. He was subsequently charged with assorted crimes, but he denied wrongdoing, insisting that he didn't realize he'd been sacked at the time he let his fingers do the walking, and as an employee, he had access to the safe.

As for why he took the money, he insisted that CP's owners owed even more than what he took but hadn't ponied up. To that end, he later filed a lawsuit against them in small-claims court for just over $5,200.

Balls? Big ones....

Continue to keep counting down our five weirdest stories of work revenge. Number 1: "Man stabs himself rather than go to work at Blockbuster: Understandable!"

Here's how we wrote about this bizarre event on an early November Tuesday in 2009:
At about 6:30 p.m. on Monday night, Aaron Siebers reported that he'd been stabbed in Edgewater by "three skinheads or Hispanic males dressed in black" who tried to rob him. Trouble is, a surveillance video from a business where this alleged attack supposedly took place didn't show anything like what Siebers described. So the cops interviewed him again -- and this time, he reportedly admitted that he stabbed himself rather than go to work at a Sheridan Boulevard Blockbuster.

An insanity defense wouldn't seem like the best way to go for Siebers when fighting the false-reporting charge he faces, since everyone with a job at Blockbuster probably dreams of stabbing himself on occasion, making it a totally logical impulse. Then again, maybe Siebers could argue that a sane man would have turned a blade on himself a lot sooner than he did. Either way, we're pulling for him.

Don't know what happened to Siebers -- but we know what happened to most of the Blockbusters in the Denver area, and around the country. Call it Aaron's revenge.

More from our Business archive: "Photos: 300 Blockbusters closing in weeks, no word yet how many in Colorado."

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