HR Undercover

Not only was my manager in a mortgage company the worst leader of people I had worked for in my entire career, I was so happy I had already decided to leave my job when she was showing her direct reports how to forge customer signatures. You know, the complicated docs customers sometimes do not understand? Heck, in her case, maybe they neve even got to try and read them. So what was her great secet? She would simply take a doc the customer had signed, hold it up against a window and place the unsigned doc over it and trace the signature. So simplistic it’s stupid. But she was showing her staff how to do this!

Let me tell you about the time I was working for a high-tech start-up company that employed a married couple, both in senior positions but not reporting to one another. The husband thought he was “Rico Suave” and made it a regular habit to wear gold chains, too much cologne, snake-skin boots and his graying hair slicked back (sometimes in a small ponytail). He evoked images of Dennis Hopper in the David Lynch film, Blue Velvet. He was a living example of a time when a book absolutely matched its cover and he proved it with a colossal screw up that will live in infamy at this company. He was on a business trip in Italy where he was supposed to be meeting with a key supplier on parts for the company’s product. The supplier called the US headquarters office (where “Rico” was based) and lodged a complaint saying that “Rico” had shown up several hours late for the scheduled meeting and had had a woman in tow that exhibited very amorous behavior towards “Rico” during the entire meeting. The whole scene was incredibly awkward and disconcerting for the supplier. Once we unraveled the whole story it turned out that “Rico” was carrying on an illicit, international love affair with a married female employee based in the company’s London office and had taken this married female employee with him to Italy on the business trip at the company’s expense. Meanwhile, Rico’s poor wife had no idea of what he had been up to. We had the very unpleasant task of giving her a heads up (as diplomatically as possible) while she was on her own business trip the reasons for our firing her husband while she was away. We also fired the London employee. Their terminations were quickly followed by divorces in both cases.

shame

I was working for a high-tech start-up company and a recently terminated, disgruntled employee found a back-door entry into the company’s email system and managed to send a shocking email to every worldwide employee. I came to work one morning and was immediately confronted with, “Have you seen the email?” by several employees and executives. Once I did log on I was astounded to find a lengthy diatribe from the disgruntled former employee explaining the “real” reasons for his termination. He was not terminated for poor performance as his supervisor had outlined for him on several occasions. No! He was actually terminated because his girlfriend (who also worked for the company in a different department) was having a lesbian affair with his supervisor and his supervisor had wanted to be rid of him because he was competition!! As I was burying my head in my hands and trying to sort out what we were going to do next with this mess, I received an email from one of the London employees that made me smile. She wrote, “I came in this morning and was feeling very down about England having lost in the play offs to go to the World Cup and then I opened up this email from ______ and it absolutely made my day! What a wonderful piece of juicy gossip!” There is always a silver lining….I guess.

Let me tell you about the time I was working for a company and a female employee in the IT department lodged a sexual harassment complaint citing that her male co-workers were a “boy’s club” that treated her as an outsider and excluded her from their activities. Her prime example of how they didn’t “include” her was they didn’t invite her to go to the strip club with them during lunch. Go figure!