A man says he showered, put on a clean shirt, and started a new job, then was fired before lunch over something no one would explain

A Reddit user posting as Havocko says he’d been unemployed for nine and a half months and had already used up his unemployment benefits when he landed a job through a temp agency that paid more than his last one. According to Daily Dot, he wrote in a post on r/BoyDinnerDiaries that he showered the night before and put on a new polo shirt.

Nothing here has been confirmed by the employer, the supervisor, or the temp agency; the entire account rests on his version of what happened. His supervisor gave him a tour of the office, which he said was better stocked than any job he’d had before, then handed him off to a trainer around 30 minutes in.

The trainer stepped away for a meeting, came back saying she had other work to do, then told him before noon that he could take an early lunch. As he headed out the door, the temp agency called to say he was being let go, about two and a half hours after he’d arrived.

He still doesn’t know what actually went wrong

The reason given was “hygiene issues,” with no further explanation from the company or his supervisor. He said his pants could have used a lint roller but weren’t visibly dirty, and wondered whether scratching his nose looked like something else, or whether a mouth-closed burp had been heard. He said he ate a bagel about an hour into the shift, brushes and flosses daily, and had seen a dentist over the summer.

A friend confirmed his breath and shirt didn’t smell, and that his home, despite having a cat and dog, was clean. One friend who did get close enough to check said she caught a faint hint of sweat, though only after getting right up next to him. Those confirmations, like everything else here, come from him relaying what his friends told him, not from the friends themselves. He raised, and dismissed, the possibility that race played a role, noting the office itself was diverse.

The temp agency, he wrote, stopped responding to him once the employer’s decision came down. Commenters offered their own theories about what may have actually gone on. One pointed to a practice sometimes called “hire to fire,” writing, “Look up ‘Hire to fire’ sounds like you may have been a victim.” Another suspected the hygiene explanation was invented after the fact: “I’m sure they just needed to invent a reason to send you away and chose violence.”

Whether an employer has to explain a firing at all depends on where you live. Every U.S. state except Montana follows at-will employment, meaning a company can end the relationship at any time, for any reason or no stated reason, as long as the actual reason isn’t illegal, such as discrimination based on race, sex, disability or another protected category.

Montana requires good cause once an employee clears a probationary period, but nowhere in the country does a private employer generally have a legal duty to explain a termination to the worker. Temp positions add another layer. Workers placed through a staffing agency are typically employed by the agency itself, not the client company where they’re working, under what’s sometimes called a joint-employer arrangement.

That structure is part of why an agency can end an assignment quickly with little explanation, and why the worker’s actual employer of record, the agency, is the one who ultimately delivers the news, as happened here.