Firings I’ve been a part of (Part Two)

Part one can be found here: https://imgur.com/gallery/weird-firings-ive-been-part-of-BYe1MZy

Here are a few more stories of weird employee issues and firings I have been a part of over the years. Part one got so much attention, I thought it would be fun to do another.

One of the stores I over saw training for was located just outside of New Orleans. We had more staff problems there than any of the other 15 locations combined. Why? New Orleans, that's why!

If you’ve ever spent some time there, you know that New Orleans is one of those few places left in the United States that is very tolerant and accepting of artists, weirdos, loners, burnouts, free spirits, and those that live outside the lines. It’s also more tolerant of things like hard drugs, prostitution, excessive alcohol consumption, drunk driving, and murder. It’s just a way of life down there.

So we opened a store in the suburbs, and I went in to train the employees in all their different capacities. I'd spent the last two months training the new store manager that had moved from New England. It was a real culture shock for him, to say the least.

A few months went by, and I was back at home base doing my normal work when I got a phone call from him. One of their sales people had come in to work with slurred speech and kept falling asleep on the job. He said she was mostly incoherent when she spoke, and he didn’t know what to do. So I asked if he thought she was having a medical emergency, like a stroke. He said no, he just thought she was high, and not on marijuana. His guess was opiates.

So I told him to have her call a ride and send her to get drug tested. I gave him all the information he needed to make that happen, and called ahead and prepaid for the test with the local provider. He sent her to get tested and it all came back clean as a whistle. He said that really concerned him, because she was obviously impaired by something… She came back to work the next day and seemed fine. Great!

A few weeks went by, and it happened again. Once again the manager called me and I told him to repeat the steps. She called for a ride, went to take the test and came back 100% clean. HR counseled with her that she should probably see a doctor about the issue, and if she had a medical reason not to come into work, we would rather her call in, than get behind the wheel and endanger herself or others.

Third time I got the call, about six weeks later, I told the manager I was coming down personally, and would have the testing place come to the store to test her, and 14 other people. I told him to put everyone's name in a hat and pull out 14 names for a random drug test. I told him to make sure he included his own name and all the other managers as well. I got in my car and drove the two hours to New Orleans.

The testing company was there when I got there. The employee was refusing testing and arguing that she shouldn’t be tested because she had just been tested twice. We explained that it was in her contract that if she was pulled for a drug test she had to submit to it, or lose her job. (We had a large warehouse there with lots of really dangerous equipment. It was definitely a safety issue.) She finally agreed…

And tested positive for ALL THE DRUGS! Among the drugs were:
PCP
Opioids
Marajuana
Cocaine
Alcohol
Ketamine

She was terminated and we got her a ride home.

The full story came out a few days later when I got a call from another employee. She was a heavy user of drugs, and had been bragging to her coworkers that the first two times she was tested, she sent her TWIN SISTER in with her ID to take the drug tests. Her sister was clean, and also one of the worst enablers I’ve ever heard of.

But yes, that’s my one and only, true life, evil twin story. The only problem was the evil twin worked for us!

The Case of the Poopy Footprints

Same store, different employee.

Once we hired the store manager for that location we started interviewing sales managers. We had four strong candidates, all from out of state, but two of them had far more experience than the others. We will call them Younger Guy and Older Guy, as not to give away any identifiable information about them. The store manager really wanted Younger Guy and the owners and I were encouraging him to go with Older Guy. Younger Guy had much better sales numbers (Or so he claimed), but when we interviewed him I just felt something was off. Some of his answers sounded sketchy, but more than that, I just didn’t get a good feeling about him. He made the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

Eventually we big footed the store manager on the hire and he hired Older Guy, and he turned out to be excellent for the position. The store manager also hired Younger Guy as a sales person. Fine.

The first weird thing was on his first day of training, remember we had 25 new salespeople we were training that day, we placed a lunch order and he informed us that no one could order onions on their food, because he was allergic. When he was asked why that meant no one could have onions on their burgers, he said “If they fart, and I breathe it, I’ll die”. Absolutely serious.

A couple days later he's in the break room talking about how important it is that your urine has no color to it at all, with a bunch of women that were uncomfortable with the conversation, asking them how often they look at the color of their urine. HR counseling, move on.

Grand opening weekend, we are packed to the gills, the manager and I are in his office making sure that all the orders are being placed correctly, new staff and high volume could lead to problems. Younger Guy comes in and says he soiled his clothes and needed to go home for a shower and a change. The store manager said sure and to hurry back. His response was vague and it didn’t sound like he was coming back to me, so I asked the manager to call him on his cell and get clarification. Then I looked at the floor… He had defecated in his pants and was leaving crappy footprints everywhere he walked. On the brand new, very white carpet. (Who the f*%& decides white carpet is good for retail?!?!?!?!?)

Did he leave out of one of the side doors, or the warehouse? Nope. He walked out the front door and left a giant trail of shit across the whole floor on opening weekend. The manager and I spent hours cleaning it out of the carpet.

There was problem after problem with this guy. Sexual harassment, alcohol use, disappearing during shift, and the manager was a little too timid to fire him. Eventually it became necessary when he came to work so drunk that he could barely walk.

Interestingly he tried to sue for wrongful termination, not because he claimed he wasn’t drunk, but because he said the company had no right to tell him he couldn’t be drunk at work. The court did not accept the suit.

The Sexy Showroom

Okay, this one still gets me.

For a while we had been noticing that there was stock missing from the warehouse. The warehouse was enormous, and we had about $8 million dollars in stock, so it was a lot to keep track of. But every few days we would go to pull something and it wouldn’t be there. The warehouse guys weren’t reporting it, they would just find the same item in another location and pull it. So it wasn’t until we were completely out of the item that we would be notified.

After a secret overnight spot check inventory we all knew we had a problem, and we knew it was internal theft, but we couldn’t figure out how it was happening. We had cameras but a worker pulling merchandise to deliver looks a lot like a worker pulling merchandise to steal. We interviewed the staff and nobody knew anything, of course. We tried all the usual methods of detection and they were all a bust.
What we didn’t know was the scale of the theft. Eventually we had to shut down operations for three days and inventory the whole warehouse. Normally we would expect about 1% shrinkage from one year to the next inventory. Usually less. We were looking at close to 7%.

I was managing training at the time, so it wasn’t my primary responsibility to deal with this, but there was a group of about five people the owners knew for certain weren’t doing it, and I was one of them, so I was in on all the meetings. We were spinning our wheels!

I knew how it must be happening, or thought I did. Warehouse workers were pulling more than what they needed that day for delivery drivers, and delivery drivers were loading it on the truck. Instead of dropping it off at a customer’s house they were dropping it off at their own home, or relatives or whatever. (I was only half right.)

Then one day the COO calls me and asks what I’m doing for lunch that day. I told him nothing, and asked if he wanted to get lunch. “No,” he said, “I want to go serve a warrant. Want to come along?” As it turned out, I did!

We get to this employee’s house that was off that day with a load of cops, and they executed the search warrant. We were there to identify merchandise that belonged to the store. Sure enough, every room of her house was filled to the brim with stolen merchandise. The scariest part was she had built a showroom in her living room, complete with old displays and cases she had stolen from the store. She had even stolen price tags with the company's name on them to use in her showroom.

All in, she had almost $300,000 worth of stolen merchandise in her home when they searched it. The rest she had sold. She was selling merchandise for about one quarter what we were paying for it from the distributors.

Here’s the twist! She had half the warehouse staff in on this, and so a lot of people got fired. But the way she was getting them to do it was she would sleep with them, but only AFTER she sold whatever they brought her. That was their “commission”. Apparently enough of them thought that was a good enough deal to lose their jobs over it.

Of course charges were pressed, and insurance allowed us to recoup some of our losses. But we lost so many people from that side of the business it was months before we were staffed up and at full capacity again.

I’ve mentioned it before, but when an employee does something like this it isn't the corporation that gets hurt, it's the people. In this case she IMMEDIATELY ratted out all the people that had been helping her, trying to get some leniency. It’s always the people that get hurt.

I posted this about a week ago, and then took it down as all the text and images were jumbled. Sorry if you're seeing this twice.

Part One: https://imgur.com/gallery/weird-firings-ive-been-part-of-BYe1MZy