Well, I didn’t work with this guy except in the sense that at the time, he was a paralegal at one of the firms that was outside counsel to my employer. I never trusted the guy because whenever I asked him questions about the status of various cases, and it turns out I was right - some years later, after he became a lawyer, he scammed two corporate clients out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs for legally required newspaper ads that he never ran. (The company I worked for was not named in the suit, but I bet there were other victims.)
When I was 21 or so, I was working at a McD’s. One co-worker, who was somewhere between 18 and 21, claimed to be pregnant. Other co-workers who knew her outside of work said “She’s not pregnant; she just wants the alleged father to marry her.” She was known for being an attention junkie, and often dishonest, and also her parents didn’t seem to know about this. I said it could be that she purposely “forgot” to use BC to force the guy’s hand, and she was waiting to tell her parents until it was too late for them to intervene. So we got a calendar and said, “Okay, the supposed conception would have been in this two-week window…and the latest that a pregnancy can start showing is this…so if she’s not showing by this time at the latest, we know she’s faking.” And meanwhile, “Mary” is whining that she can’t do this, that or the other because pregnant.
I never found out, though; I don’t know if anyone did. When the Day of Judgment had almost arrived, we were all in the break room, including Mary. The store manager, followed by the owner, stormed in, barked, “Everyone out except Mary!” We scattered, and a few minutes later, Mary left in tears, followed by a scowling manager. An assistant manager confirmed what we’d suspected: Mary had made some cash disappear while closing out her register, the security cameras confirmed this, plus she’d filled out the paperwork in a way that didn’t conceal the theft. Maybe, if she really was pregnant, she’d have said she was doing it “for my baby”. But I’ll never know.
Back when I was a FF cashier I had money come up missing from my till. $5 here, 10 there. We (the cashiers) did not check out our tills but rather a manager or ass. manger did. Up until a newly transferred in ASS. manager started doing my tills I was seldom more than .30 off. After about a month of missing money going on my record and that ASS. manager not helping with the afternoon restocking (she preferred sitting in the back office talking on the phone to her kid) I quit.
I went to work across the street at a pizza joint I had worked at before I had kids. About a month after I was there one of the ass. managers from the place I quit came in for pizza. We were friendly so we were gossiping. Turns out the ASS. manager was caught stealing from the tills and was fired. It was also why they had transferred her to that location. Her old store thought she was stealing… the new store had cameras in the office.
As an HR professional, I saw more problem employees come and go than I care to remember, but there was one who sticks out primarily because he scammed so many companies before he finally got his comeuppance.
Jack, we’ll call him, was a 40-year old skilled steel worker on paper. Although he had more job changes than usual on his resume, he explained it away by layoffs and downsizing which was common in the industry at that time. His references were impeccable, his skills test passed with flying colors. Jack was hired and worked at an elite level for 6 months until he injured his back on the job. Although it didn’t appear serious at first, the recovery dragged out for the full 18 mths our company had to retain him as an employee on short, then long-term, disability. After it was determined that he wouldn’t ever be able to resume his duties, we were able to take him off payroll.
You are probably either wondering what was so terrible about that or why am I such a cold-hearted ***** that I enjoyed this termination. Jack, I found out, had quite a reputation in the area. He had pulled this exact same scam on over a half-dozen other companies over the previous 10-12 years. Work for six months, get “injured”, and collect monetary benefits while he sat at home for the next 18 months. Our area had only one major workmen’s comp administrator, and their primary doctor was Jack’s brother-in-law. He wrote up Jack’s “injuries” each time as a new incident and repeatedly certified him as permanently disabled.
Word finally got out, as it eventually seems to do, and both Jack and his doctor brother-in-law were arrested for fraud, but by this time, they had collectively defrauded nearly every small manufacturing concern in the region.
What happened when you asked about various cases? Did he lie, or stall, or evade, or a combination of all of the above plus more?
Another one: When I was in my late teens, I worked at Target. Not long after I started, when I was 16, they hired a woman in her 30s with whom I had a surprising amount in common, and by the time we were starting to become friends, I saw her leave one day in tears. I found out later that she had been caught stealing money, something I had not heard any rumors about at all - AND her husband was a police officer!
I did see her one other time - probably a couple years later, also at Target. Presumably, she was no longer banned from shopping there, and came through my lane. She didn’t seem to recognize me; by that time, I would have gotten my braces off and grown my hair out somewhat.
I joined the company immediately after a huge merger and later found out that the company had been in the process of transitioning work away from his firm anyway (and we were working with 3 other outside law firms). The way the first step of the employment-based permanent residency process works (labor certification, in which the employer is legally required to document that there are no U.S. workers available and willing to take the job at the prevailing wage for the position, level, and geographic location), the employer (often via a delegated law firm) is required to run newspaper ads on 2 consecutive Sundays in certain newspapers for each metro area, as well as multiple other forms of recruitment, over a 180-day period. After the recruitment runs, there is a waiting period during which the employer must follow up with any applicants for the job and screen them to see whether they meet the qualifications (and interview them, if they do and they are interested in the job). Only after all the recruitment has run and any potentially qualified U.S. workers are determined to be either not available or not qualified can the labor certification application be filed with the Dept. of Labor.
Post-merger, as a bunch of cases got assigned to me for monitoring and liaising with internal HR, hiring managers, etc. to screen candidates and make sure the company was in compliance with the legal recruitment requirements, I would ask him where we were in the process, could I have copies of the recruitment materials, applicant resumes, etc. for the company’s records (the Dept. of Labor can audit the employer and impose significant fines for noncompliance). I was also skeptical that these ads were mostly not turning up any applicants at all.
He would tell me “the case is ready to be filed” and never cough up any of the supporting documentation I asked for except for a spreadsheet created by him, and honestly I was too busy and the company was paying the firm way too much money for me to be able to expend more resources babysitting him. I left that job after not too long (it sucked for all sorts of other reasons), so I never had the chance to push the point. Turns out I was right to be skeptical.
Mine’s a little different than some on here.
The most satisfying dismissal I ever saw was in about 2012 or so; our health care company had been bought by a huge health insurer, and there were a series of IT initiatives that were not terribly well conceived that were ramping up. They weren’t going well and we were already short-handed and our skills set didn’t line up with our needs, so the CIO was on the hot seat.
She managed to wind everyone up, make us paranoid, and try and implement some kind of dumb-ass department mentality/methodology that was talking about “going faster” and “being nimble” and “make mistakes early” and stuff like that, when literally everyone with any sense was saying “Let’s slow down and/or take a pause, staff up appropriately, prioritize, set realistic goals and timelines and execute.”
Basically she put the screws to us for about six months, wrecked morale and made us all paranoid that the new company was going to lay us all off, before they finally shit-canned her. Talk about breathing a sigh of relief!
In the end, we DID take a pause, staff up appropriately, and executed. There were no mass layoffs. They still had problems with reasonable timelines and morale when I left earlier this year.
I was working for a commercial bank in the 70’s and had an opportunity to move to another local bank for significantly more $$. They had just gone through a massive conversion from one computer system to another. And no one there had a clue on how to make the books balance. There had been no trial runs, no mock conversions, no data validation, etc. Once the CEO and CFO became aware of just how screwed up their customer files and accounts were, the top 3 operations and IT people were canned.
Took months of overtime to get things under control and loss writeoffs were in the hundreds of thousands.
I worked at a place where the receptionist’s son and daughter were also employed on the sales team. The receptionist had gotten management to agree that she could lead a “phone relief staff” who would take turns on the phone while she took her 20-minute mandatory breaks and 90-minute lunch hours.
The phone relief staff was picked from the customer service and manufacturing teams because, she argued, the sales people were too important for that. We had a carefully written script# and we had to play the stereo behind the reception desk and we were not allowed to change the station (Worst of the 1970’s Radio) or lower the volume or bring our own paperwork to deal with while we were minding the phones. We were instructed to give her son & daughter first priority for incoming sales calls; we experimented during the week that she took a summer vacation and directed calls to the sales people equally – and found that the new customer sign-ups skyrocketed during that period.
As time passed and I got to know my phone-relief colleagues better, it became clear that the receptionist chose us in particular because she felt she could boss us around because we* were minorities. There were lots of other people in the customer service and manufacturing departments, but she only chose the minorities to be her minions.
As some point she managed to convince the executives to purchase flower arrangements from the nearby shop where her mother happened to work, and huge bouquets would be brought in every Monday. I began noticing a pattern of the arrangements drying out and dropping pollens by mid-week, wreaking havoc on my allergies. When I noted my observation to management, they told the receptionist she would have to move her giant vase out of the lobby before my shifts started. She did so one day, then stopped, then complained to management that I wasn’t relieving her on-schedule. [She wasn’t relieving my allergies so I wasn’t relieving her at all.]
Active customers (not just potential sales leads) would complain to me about the receptionist’s manners. The other phone-relievers had other complaints, including racist comments and just plain old rudeness. We compared notes and learned “Wow! You’re the only one who has ever mentioned this!” was an HR mantra – until we gathered around the owner and a manager during the company gift-exchange party and collectively shared our stories. The experiment that resulted in the better-without-the-kids sales result was also brought up, and the owner was unhappy to learn the receptionist had invented such a give-my-kids-the-best-commissions rule.
The receptionist went on her annual all-December holiday break. On the eve of New Years Eve, she was called and told not to bother coming back.
When the manager brought the phone-relievers together to quietly confide that the receptionist had been dismissed, we volunteered to each take a day of the week to cover the phones. Management was impressed with our initiative, but assured us a Temp agency already had someone lined-up, On January second, while the Temp covered the phones, the phone-reliever team went to lunch to celebrate. I was so happy about it that I paid for everyone’s lunch!
–G!
I thought it was odd that the script did not include the company’s name and she reminded me a couple times that I shouldn’t waste time with more than “Hello” for a greeting. On that I refused to change, saying “Good morning/afternoon/evening at [company]…” because I thought it was more professional and, I argued, that extra bit of courtesy didn’t really tax my asthmatic lungs too much.
- All except for the lady who was a single mother living in a mobile home. She was actually a classy lady from an upper-class family whose husband died in some accident and she didn’t want her own family telling her what to do with their child. But the receptionist considered her “white trash” because she lived in a mobile home and treated her as badly as she treated the minorities.
Grestarian, how could a receptionist wield that much power? Was she related in some way to a bigshot at the company?
It’s hilarious that a post by The Vorlon would be incomprehensible. Best user name/ post combo ever. 
What does “conyo” (pronounced) mean? I don’t have that special “n” on my keyboard to use for Google Translate.
coño = con (Fr.) = cunnus = cunt, literally.
Not a super polite idiom, but I guess you have to use it like salt, a dash makes all the difference where flavour is missing, but too much and your dish becomes inedible.
Your post has intruded on my thoughts, at odd times, for over a week now. I hope life has been better to you since then.
Around 2010 or '11, my friend P’s colleague G was called into a meeting, escorted out by security, and his office was locked and then later searched. He had been fired but would never level with P or anyone about the reason. A mutual colleague found out later that it was because of his viewing of kiddie porn.
Last year, the FBI showed up at his house early on a Sunday morning and arrested him at gunpoint. He may have been part of an international cyber- ring, which is apparently why they took so long to gather evidence and take other people down along with him. He still had computers and hard drives with all the vids and pics in his home. Due to the company being very well known, the firing and the ensuing mess were never publicized.
He went to prison earlier this year.
We once had a person who claimed to have “multiple chemical sensitivities.” She could not do anything in the office that didn’t make her dizzy, give her a head ache, or make her nauseous. Unpack the signs? “Oh, the plastic makes me dizzy.” Pull a file for me? “Oh, the dust is giving me a headache.” She once went home when I made a cup of tea with saccharine in it. Claimed it was giving her a headache.
I caught her printing out gay male porn from the Internet, and I mean some pretty raunchy stuff. She got fired immediately.
I was under the impression that said company policy is illegal-you cannot stop employees from comparing paychecks, as far as I know.
Am I wrong?
edited to add: Just found article on illegal pay secrecy policies.
How cultures differ. We used to get little inserts in the local paper with everyone’s income on it once a year. Now we just put it on the internet.
Someone did not know how to fight for their job. The point of not having employees talk about what they are being paid is to keep wages down.
Sorry, I just noticed this question. Part of it was physical - our campus was spread across eight different buildings and one of them contained all of the test labs. People who were testing sometimes had to work evening shifts to get higher usage rate out of the equipment. Part of it was cultural - we were treated as responsible adults who would show up and get the job done. So, between testing and meeting with people in other buildings, it wasn’t uncommon that people weren’t in their offices when you would look for them. And because of the culture of trust, as long as you saw them some time during the day, then you assumed they were there all day. After this incident we had to start checking our assumptions a little more closely.