Thursday, April 14, 2016

Learning to keep your mouth shut (I fired a guy, part 2).

A few days ago, my boss came to me and whispered.  She often whispers, because she's smart.  We live in the cubicle world and anything you say can and will be held against you.  If it's heard.

The problem is that since I look so young, like maybe 25 or 30, she speaks so low that these ever-growing ears can barely hear her.  I am often saying back to her, "Eh?" almost certainly destroying the illusion of my youth and giving away most of my 51 years.

She was whispering something about would I  mind asking a certain colleague to lunch.  I told her I'd be glad to.  This is a person that I will be working with a lot in the near future.  I don't really sit near him so we've never really just gotten together to B.S.

So today we went down to the dome to eat lunch and chat.  He's been at our company from roughly the time of the recent round of U.P. layoffs.  Mostly because he was one of them.  He had been at the U.P. for 12 years.  He started as a contractor in St. Louis.  He worked for Transcentric and UPDS or whatever. He moved to Omaha when it was required to stay on at the company.

He is now a contractor at our company and I hope he gets hired on.

Anyway, we were chatting about some of the people we both know and I learned a ton of rumors. Juicy stuff.

We were laughing about how the U.P. compels you to step forward and report anything you see that is in any way an EEO violation.  He and I were both of the same opinion.  I will sign the paper, but I'm not going to report anyone for just anything I might have overheard.

This really happened in my group while I was working at the U.P.:

Somebody sent an email to everyone on his team.  There were about 12 people who got the email.  I also got the email.  It was "The Fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant."

It might have been altered a bit.  I don't really remember.  I had started reading it and thought it seemed like political propaganda.  I then deleted it.  My indifference about those things is and always shall be so incredibly high.

There was a person who received the email who took it as racially charged.  He felt he was being singled out.  He read the story as saying that his ethnic group was being called lazy.  To be fair, he came from a teeny tiny country called "Grasshopperia" so if I squint, I can see his point.

What happened next was that everybody got called into the boss's office to account for why nobody reported the racist email.  We had all agreed to report any such behavior.  We had signed things promising to snitch on anybody who might have said anything that somebody might take offense to.

So yeah - U.P. meant it.  But it's totally stupid. I understand what they are trying to do, but this sort of Big Brother "tattling" is something I have always shied away from.

Well.  Not always.  But ever since I worked at Idelman Telemarketing.

I remember Idelman having similar policies as the sort of thing UP was doing.  "If you see somebody stealing something, you must report it."

Guess what?  You've hired security for that.  I don't actually think they were asking us to report what we saw.  I think they were trying to scare us by saying, "If you steal something and anybody here sees you, they are required to tell us about it."

Challenge accepted.

In a way, my telemarketing job was the first "professional" job I had.  It was in an office.  There were all kinds of political correctness things to learn. But I had become firmly convinced that tattling on a coworker will bring you way more trouble than clamming up.

For example, one time when I was working at Butsy Le Doux's, I had to fire a guy because of my big mouth.

A combination of bizarre circumstances landed me the cushy assistant manager post at the restaurant.

Jim, the assistant was considering leaving the company to go work for the state. But the jury was still out. Most people didn't believe he could do it. I wasn't so sure. I knew one thing.  If he did leave, I was the obvious choice for new assistant.  What with my mayonnaise extraction acumen and everything.

Ultimately, Jim did leave and my title became "Night Cook."  Mother was so proud.

As assistant manager, I had some responsibility.  I was involved with ordering food.  I had to decide on the soup and specials for the day.  It was normally just something I'd whip up from Paul Prudhomme's cookbook with whatever food we had to get rid of very soon.

Never order the special.

I felt the power of my authority coursing through my veins.  Having never been in a position of authority in my 20 years, it maybe kind of, sort of went to my head a little.

Even though this was 31 years ago, we still had to leave the kitchen to smoke.  There was a stairway in the back of the kitchen leading to the outside. If I went out for a smoke break, I'd go there and usually daydream as I watched the crew doing the kitchen things.

On one occasion, my eyes rested on William. William was an incredibly friendly guy.  Always soft spoken and quick with a smile.  He was about 6'6" and 250 pounds of no fat.

William lived near 48th and just north of Dodge in a halfway house.  Yeah, William the big ol' lovable ex-con.

The thing about William was he had to hold a job.  Any job.  Something about his parole agreement.  He needed this job even if he didn't really need the money. I liked William.  I liked him a lot because when the owner hired him and introduced him to everyone, my first thought was, "Oh my shit.  This fucker is totally going to kill us all immediately."

So my expectations were low.  Once he settled into the routine of the job though I started to think, "I love the way William hasn't killed any of us at all yet!"

But as I was smoking my cigarette watching William, something seemed off.  I couldn't quite put my finger on it. He was holding a butcher knife and slicing frozen okra.  No big deal there.  He had the cutting board sitting on top of a garbage can.  Ok, probably not the most sanitary, but I'll allow it.  The tops of the okra get discarded, so maybe he's just sliding them into the trash and the rest into the pan.

So I watched him.  He sliced up about 20 pieces of okra to the perfect width. Then with the knife, he scraped all of it into the garbage.

I was so confused, I watched until he did the whole thing again.

I ran down and said, "William!  What are you doing?"

He snapped out of a trance.  He looked at me.  He looked down at the cutting board and into the trash.  He looked back at me and grinned a huge grin.

"I am so fucking wasted," he confessed.  This was horrible.  He can't lose his job.  Especially for being wasted at work.  I've known a ton of good people who never ever could have been honest with me at that point.  But he was.  I wish he would have lied.  Not really.  I wish his confession would have been to a better manager.  A manager like say, me, 5 days after this happened.

I told him it was ok; that he should go home and straighten up before he came back.  He was cool with that.

Then I made my mistake that I have yet to repeat.  Not at U.P.  Not anywhere else.

I tattled.  I figured I needed to know what to do about the situation, so I went to the owner that hired him and told him what happened.  I was stupid.  I thought he'd guide me in whatever punishment William was in for.  I envisioned something like, "Just tell him if he ever does that again ..."

No.  "You saw it.  You need to fire him."

Gulp. Not only was I terrified of the idea.  I didn't agree with it.

William's next shift was the next day and I had worried about what I'd say to him the whole time.

In the end, I deflected.  I told him I didn't want to fire him, but the owner was making me.  I was sorry.  William surprised me once again.  I hated myself for essentially ratting him out (this is why I have never seen myself as "leadership material").  He said, "It's cool.  It was my mistake."

He shook my hand and left.  At that point I thought about how I'd probably be all crying and everything if it were happening to me.  Also, I probably would have cried a lot in prison too, so.

The experience was awful, but the lesson was worth it: No matter what the man says, keep your mouth shut.  Fuck that guy.  Also, where did William get that weed? Seriously.  That had to be some righteous bud or whatever.

1 comment:

Dan Kuhns said...

Nobody likes a rat.