Aviva Fires Everyone: Great Moments in Employee Motivation

Workers across Europe are on tenterhooks these days, with all the talk of debt crises and such. So it was a dark day indeed for 1,300 workers at Aviva Investors, the asset management arm of the U.K. insurance company, when they opened a company e-mail on Friday to find out they had been fired. Please hand over your passwords and any company property and leave the building, they were told.

The only problem: Just one unfortunate soul was supposed to get the message. Oops.