One woman got fired from Gold’s Gym for an unexpected reason: A customer stole her backpack.
In a viral video that has amassed over 416,000 views as of July 5, TikToker Jess Jacobsen (@oohhjess) explained how a customer’s wrongdoing cost her a job.
@oohhjesss Dear Golds Gym, please take me back I miss u #storytime ♬ original sound – Jess Jacobsen
“I got banned and fired from Gold’s Gym,” Jacobsen said to start her video. “I thought it was just the one in LA. Turns out, it’s all of them.”
Four years after being fired, Jacobsen posted her video to ask the company to finally put the incident behind them.
“I’m making this video because I just want them to give me a second chance,” she urged.
Jacobsen explained that she wasn’t working the day of the incident. She took the day off to study for an important exam later in the evening. After spending the day prepping for the exam, she hit the gym for a workout.
Upon entering the locker room, Jacobsen realized that she left her padlock in her gym bag at home. She said she left the backpack she brought with her in an unsecured locker because its contents—her school books and car keys—were only valuable to her.
However, when she returned, the bag wasn’t in the locker where she left it.
“Now I’m frantically f*cking ripping the doors of every single locker,” she explained.
After confirming her backpack was no longer where she left it, she decided to track her keys, which had a GPS tracker on them. She then discovered her bag was in the locker room in someone else’s locked locker.
“Oh, what do you know,” she said. “It’s f*cking beeping in this locked locker with this fat a** padlock on it.”
Jacobsen figured all she needed to do was get her manager to cut the lock so she could retrieve her backpack. However, her manager refused to step in and told her to wait for the person to return and open the lock.
“I’m like, ‘I would. I just can’t; I have to leave right now,’” she recounted.
Her manager knew she had an important test to take and needed to get to class on time but said it was policy not to cut any locks until the gym closed.
“I’m like, ‘but we’ve done it a million times for people,’” the TikToker tried to argue.
Her manager still wouldn’t budge. However, she decided to get on the intercom and demand the person who took the bag return to the locker room to sort things out.
“Do you think the person who stole my sh*t came and met us in the locker room?” Jacobsen asked.
Unsurprisingly, they did not. After Jacobsen sat around crying for hours, her manager finally showed up with a bolt cutter to cut the lock. Though it was before the gym closed, it was still an hour after Jacobsen was supposed to take her test.
“I’m really sorry you had to miss your test,” Jacobsen recalled her manager saying while cutting the lock.
The TikToker said she had been thinking of mean things to say the whole time she waited, but she didn’t intend to say them. That is until her manager “provoked” her with that comment.
“Oh, are you? I’m sorry for the baby because their mom is such a b*tch,” Jacobsen shot back at her manager, who was an expectant mother.
Jacobsen said she was fired within a few days. Which, according to her description of Gold’s Gym policy, meant she also got banned from the gym.
In the comments section, many viewers said Jacobsen should have called authorities after her manager refused to step in.
“You should have asked once and when she said no call the police,” one commenter said.
“You should have called the police,” another agreed.
Others were dumbfounded by the gym’s decision to terminate her employment.
“That’s absolutely bs if you had proof your stuff was stolen then you shouldn’t have been in trouble PERIOD,” one viewer wrote.
“Did i miss something?” another asked. “Why did you get fired?”
The Daily Dot contacted Jacobsen and Gold’s Gym for comment via email.
