Professional Darwinism: Update to OP on p.74

[PeterM]

I knew a guy who openly looked at porn on shared office computers. Left it open for the next user to see, even. Several of his colleagues complained to the supervisor, but she said it was because he was from a different country and culture and (I guess?) didn't realize it was unacceptable. To me, even if that makes a shred of sense - which it doesn't - it just means you tell him in no uncertain terms it's unacceptable and then give him just one more chance. But no, as far as I know he's still there. Actually, hold on...

Yeah, still there. Nice enough guy overall, but odd. Very odd. We always thought it was the language/culture barrier but another coworker told us, "No, he's weird in Chinese, too." Heh.

I think I've told this one before, and come to think of it it doesn't necessarily even qualify. We had one student who was responsible for staffing the library alone from 5 to 8 one night a week. Turns out he was leaving at 6-ish every week for almost an entire semester. We only found out because a student casually asked why our posted hours were wrong for that night. The kicker is, we couldn't fire him because it was a real hassle to fire a work study student. We could and did tell him we wouldn't be re-hiring him the next year, though. He had the nerve to call and ask that his immediate supervisor give him a reference. She did, too, because she was worried about being sued. There were a couple of stories in the news at that point about bad references leading to legal trouble. Me, I'd have outright refused or done the apparently now common "He worked here from X date to Y date, and I ain't telling you nothing else."

[PeterM]

4) While working at the same store, another employee was arrested as she worked. Every day her partner would come into the store and buy something and he'd always hang around until she was on a till and make sure he went through her till in the food hall. He'd usually have some item of clothing from elsewhere in the store that he was buying as well, and it transpired that she would ring up all his other purchases, but would never ring up the clothing.

Long, long ago when I worked as a cashier at a drug store (Fay's - obviously not your average drug store!) the scam was to ring up CDs as candy bars. That way every item was punched in and money changed hands so from a distance it looked just fine.  Some people did get too greedy and get caught, of course.

[kitty_ev]

4) While working at the same store, another employee was arrested as she worked. Every day her partner would come into the store and buy something and he'd always hang around until she was on a till and make sure he went through her till in the food hall. He'd usually have some item of clothing from elsewhere in the store that he was buying as well, and it transpired that she would ring up all his other purchases, but would never ring up the clothing.

Long, long ago when I worked as a cashier at a drug store (Fay's - obviously not your average drug store!) the scam was to ring up CDs as candy bars. That way every item was punched in and money changed hands so from a distance it looked just fine.  Some people did get too greedy and get caught, of course.

I just can't understand why you'd pull scams at work and try to cheat your employer! Not that I advocate scamming, cheating and stealing in any other sphere of existence, but most of us need our jobs and if we move jobs we'll need a reference, so I don't understand why you'd sabotage yourself!

[Veronica]

4) While working at the same store, another employee was arrested as she worked. Every day her partner would come into the store and buy something and he'd always hang around until she was on a till and make sure he went through her till in the food hall. He'd usually have some item of clothing from elsewhere in the store that he was buying as well, and it transpired that she would ring up all his other purchases, but would never ring up the clothing.

Long, long ago when I worked as a cashier at a drug store (Fay's - obviously not your average drug store!) the scam was to ring up CDs as candy bars. That way every item was punched in and money changed hands so from a distance it looked just fine.  Some people did get too greedy and get caught, of course.

I just can't understand why you'd pull scams at work and try to cheat your employer! Not that I advocate scamming, cheating and stealing in any other sphere of existence, but most of us need our jobs and if we move jobs we'll need a reference, so I don't understand why you'd sabotage yourself!

I seriously doubt PeterM did that.

[ginlyn32]

comment deleted by poster.

[KimberlyRose]

4) While working at the same store, another employee was arrested as she worked. Every day her partner would come into the store and buy something and he'd always hang around until she was on a till and make sure he went through her till in the food hall. He'd usually have some item of clothing from elsewhere in the store that he was buying as well, and it transpired that she would ring up all his other purchases, but would never ring up the clothing.

Long, long ago when I worked as a cashier at a drug store (Fay's - obviously not your average drug store!) the scam was to ring up CDs as candy bars. That way every item was punched in and money changed hands so from a distance it looked just fine.  Some people did get too greedy and get caught, of course.

I just can't understand why you'd pull scams at work and try to cheat your employer! Not that I advocate scamming, cheating and stealing in any other sphere of existence, but most of us need our jobs and if we move jobs we'll need a reference, so I don't understand why you'd sabotage yourself!

I seriously doubt PeterM did that.

I agree, but his wording is a bit on the vague side.  If we didn't "know" him, it would sound a little like it was something he did.  (Again, just want to emphasize that I don't believe he'd have done that.)

[AM in AL]

I have a bunch - worked IT long enough to find the requisite porn on VIP's PC - but the best two are both temps from back when I was an electronic tech:

Temp #1: Came to first day of new job directly from last night of old job. Kept dozing off while I was training him - with team lead standing behind us. Escorted out at first break.

We really expected that record to last a while... at least more than a week.

Temp #2: Assigned to train with me on testing a board that runs on a single station on the far side of the floor. As we reach the station, she says her first words to me - "I'm glad I got put over here. I wouldn't want to work with all those n.....s." I returned to supervisor's desk (where African-American person from temp agency was still standing, having just delivered her new employees) to express new hire's gratitude in new hire's exact words. New hire escorted out at 7:05. This record was still standing when I left.

[PeterM]

Long, long ago when I worked as a cashier at a drug store (Fay's - obviously not your average drug store!) the scam was to ring up CDs as candy bars. That way every item was punched in and money changed hands so from a distance it looked just fine.  Some people did get too greedy and get caught, of course.

I just can't understand why you'd pull scams at work and try to cheat your employer! Not that I advocate scamming, cheating and stealing in any other sphere of existence, but most of us need our jobs and if we move jobs we'll need a reference, so I don't understand why you'd sabotage yourself!

I seriously doubt PeterM did that.

Nah, and I assumed she meant a general "you." The worst I ever did was give my buddies my lousy employee discount, which basically just cut out the middle-man since they could've easily given me money and had me buy whatever for them.

As for needing a reference, this was when I was a teenager. No one cared too much about that, and when I was finally driven to quit by the new idiotic manager I walked next door to the supermarket and literally had a better job in five minutes. References weren't really on a guy's radar screen at that age.

[M-theory]

My line of work is full of this. It's so common that it errors out my brain when I try to comprehend it. But there are some notable examples from my own experience:

At my first job, one of my fellow QC decided she couldn't be bothered to actually check the documents. At all. There are ways to increase your efficiency and get enough work done to make good money while still maintaining quality - she was just plain not checking, but initialling them so she'd get paid anyway. This is extremely dangerous to the patients. In any case, she did this and got caught twice before my boss at the time, a wonderful and very forgiving person, sacked her.

At my current job, one of the other (ex) QC staff is an interesting person. My coworkers called her their job security, because as long as someone as weird and inefficient as she was stayed employed, the rest of us had to be safe. If a rule was documented, she'd ask about it in phone meetings a half-dozen times over the next several months despite the fact that it was practically muscle memory to everyone else. She was always calling one of the other QC to give her "tech support" for basic functions everyone is trained in their first week. I was surprised that she resigned before she was fired and utterly shocked that she was immediately snatched up by another company, who are probably wondering what they were thinking right about now.

Another coworker got promoted from MT to QC. She would log in during other people's shifts and take all the work at once. She would use netspeak in notes to clients. She used obnoxious red e-mail stationery after my boss asked everyone to not use e-mail stationery. After she was moved to another account, someone forgot to deactivate her login info on ours - she actually logged on without permission and took all the work for several shifts before someone reported it to my boss. Amazing.

An MT spent over a year making copious errors and showing a complete lack of knowledge of medical terminology (one of her favourite terms-that-don't-exist was "atrial fibullation") before finally getting sacked. I honestly can't figure out how she passed the screening test for employee candidates. She must have really hated her job, though, as I know given a year I could learn any subject up to the standard required for her job (fairly low, as the QC staff is there to clean up).

One of my SO's job functions as a contractor working for a bank is to monitor Internet usage and "ding" people who access sites they aren't supposed to. One of the no-no sites is Facebook. A couple of weeks ago, he dinged an intern 30 times in 10 minutes for continuing to try to access FB despite being told no FB at work.

Sometimes I wonder if the job market is really that bad, or if some people are just monstrously stupid.

[CakeBeret]

My brother is the head IT person at his company, but he does not get to do the hiring for the IT department. So, New Guy was hired to be an IT person. Over the next few days New Guy wasted hours of my brother's time asking him how to perform the simplest computer tasks. New Guy did not know how to copy and paste, create a desktop icon, or move a file to a different location, for example. They later learned that all his credentials, education, and prior experience had been falsified.

I still can't understand how someone lacking basic computer skills could expect to hold down an IT job!

[kitty_ev]

4) While working at the same store, another employee was arrested as she worked. Every day her partner would come into the store and buy something and he'd always hang around until she was on a till and make sure he went through her till in the food hall. He'd usually have some item of clothing from elsewhere in the store that he was buying as well, and it transpired that she would ring up all his other purchases, but would never ring up the clothing.

Long, long ago when I worked as a cashier at a drug store (Fay's - obviously not your average drug store!) the scam was to ring up CDs as candy bars. That way every item was punched in and money changed hands so from a distance it looked just fine.  Some people did get too greedy and get caught, of course.

I just can't understand why you'd pull scams at work and try to cheat your employer! Not that I advocate scamming, cheating and stealing in any other sphere of existence, but most of us need our jobs and if we move jobs we'll need a reference, so I don't understand why you'd sabotage yourself!

I seriously doubt PeterM did that.

Whoa.... That was a generic 'you' not a targeted 'you'! Sorry, should have made that clearer.

I meant that entire statement as "I can't understand why an individual would pull scams at work and try and cheat their employer". It was not a rant at PeterM.

Absolutely no insult towards PeterM or anyone else was intended. Peter M, I'm sorry if it came across that way. I'll be more careful with my phraseology in future.

[zyrs]

Here are a few I remember:

#1  Temp hire on his first day of work.  Goes into the breakroom to get a soda, climbs up on the breakroom table and falls asleep.  He thought that the breakroom window everyone was watching him through was one-way glass.

#2  At a different job we watched computer screens all night - the computers were monitoring processes and if there was a problem, we needed to take action.  There had to be at least one of us watching the screens the entire time (to allow for breaks and lunch) but there really needed to be two people watching things. 

My co-worker started out the night smoking an illegal substance out the window, then decided she needed to take a nap.  Six hours later she woke up.  Bear in mind, I can't leave my chair while she is not in the room so I couldn't go get her, as she had left the room.

I told my boss the next day, he stated ; "Wow, if that really happened that is a bad thing."  She still works there as far as I know.  Probably got promoted.

#3  Still a different job.  The QC computer was specifically set up to run a number of stress tests on the product we were making and there were big signs "DON"T CHANGE THE COMPUTER PROGRAM".  One night an employee decided that they were bored and wanted to play Solitaire, so they closed the QC program and played Solitaire.  When it came time to run QC stress tests, they couldn't figure out how to open the QC program.  So they took the computer apart.

[MissRose]

I'll add a few more:

*A contract employee got caught sleeping on the job by my supervisor's boss.  Needless to say, that guy isn't working here now.

*A few other guys who aren't here were upselling support plans with promises that we would do certain work.  We found out later when we had to tell a customer "sorry this level doesn't allow for X to be done" and get yelled at by a customer wasn't fun.  They aren't working here now.

*One guy brought in a 12 pack of beer to work in a paper bag.  A co-worker went to get something off this guy's desk, and was shocked that the guy brought the beer inside the office. He's not working here due to other things.

*The beer guy also was notorious for bad documentation of his customer contacts, and often wrote things in his ticket documentation that made no sense or wasn't relevant to the customer call.

*One girl was overheard telling a customer "What do you want me to do, hold your hand?".  Keep in mind this is a tech support help line.

*Another guy told a customer that his 10 minutes were up, and he had to call back due to the time limits.  We are asked to average about 10 minutes for a phone call and we aren't allowed to say that.  In a course of a week, plenty of shorter calls balance out the longer ones to meet the goal.

*One person told a customer you will have to call back, its my break or lunch time now during the call.

*One guy was intentionally screwing up on stuff as he was really hating his job & the managers and made no bones about the fact to others by him.  I remember him being escorted out the door still ranting and raving.

*A guy who was disabled that was given plenty of accomodation to do his job but still never met any of the goals & rarely sounded like he knew anything.  The boss was afraid if they let the guy go he could play the disabled card & perhaps sue.  It took about a year before enough evidence was shown that even with extra help, he's not meeting the goals, and others with his disability were able to get close to it with same types of help.  I have no idea what he's doing for a living now as he's not working here.

(Lets say that those in the examples listed aren't working at my company at all, I have no idea if they got employed elsewhere LOL)

[shadowfox79]

Friend's ex-boyfriend was always getting kicked out of jobs for s3xual harassment.

The most memorable?

Working in a bar with two fellow bartenders who were attractive twin girls - asked them if they fancied a threesome.

I'm reliably informed his feet never touched the ground.

[gardengirl]

One of my SO's job functions as a contractor working for a bank is to monitor Internet usage and "ding" people who access sites they aren't supposed to. One of the no-no sites is Facebook. A couple of weeks ago, he dinged an intern 30 times in 10 minutes for continuing to try to access FB despite being told no FB at work.

Sometimes I wonder if the job market is really that bad, or if some people are just monstrously stupid.

I wonder if the intern was told to look into creating some sort of presence for the bank on FB (yes, I know this is a REALLY kind way to look at it.)  We have an internet filter at work that keeps me from doing things my boss is able to do, so the boss is always suggesting that I do some neat technological thing, which I then can't access - and it takes me a few tries to figure out that it's not my imagination or a mistyped address, they really do block Amazon or Demco or Sports Illustrated Kids, and I will have to plead that the site be opened for teacher-level users and IT may deign to allow me access for a week.  Of course, I've never tried 30 times in 10 minutes, but I'm sure I've tried 5 times from different angles (maybe it will open if I search it!  If I use a link from here!  Or here!)