She Faked Her Child’s Death for Money [The Bad Hire Ep. 48]

00:00:00 There's actually no adoption, there's no house fire, and there's no child. When running from police at high speed, his brain said, you know what? Go to work. Go to work. Yeah. A few seconds later, I watched him light a cigarette next to a 10,000 liter acetone tank. What's he doing? This is The Bad Hire, the show with the best stories about the worst employees. We fired him, of course. People are crazy. It's like an HR nightmare. Right. One bad hire. Stole all of it. Crazy stuff. She got what she deserved. I'm your host, Ken Monroe, and every week we dive into real life stories from the wild world of work

00:00:42 and what can happen when the wrong person gets the job. These stories aren't just crazy. They're cautionary tales about lessons learned the hard way. Let's get started. Hey, everyone, and welcome back to The Bad Hire Podcast, the show with the best stories best stories about the wild world of work. Hey, I've got Nathan and Kylie. How are you guys doing? What's up? Doing good. What's up, Kylie? You know? What's your show together? Living my life. I know. I want to get some of those socks. Thanks. Yeah. I think these came in the welcome package when I was a new BeachX employee. Did they? Styling. I think so. Yeah, they've been in the drawer for a little while. I don't know that I have a pair of those, so I'm going to have... You're welcome to have these after the show.

00:01:22 I love that. Nice and clean. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, good stuff. Well, you know the drill. This is... We dive into the wildest, the weirdest, some of the most shocking hiring stories. That's some good stories to do. And people submit them to us. We find them. We do guest segments on video and kind of compile the stories that we hope that some of the folks in the hiring business and employees and managers would love to hear. Maybe it resonates with them. They've got one similar. They just think it's funny or whatever. You know, hiring people's tough work. Yeah. We know it's difficult. We know that all the good DNA in an organization, the HR people helped, and our HR folks and

00:02:03 recruiters helped get all that there. But it is these hiring fails that sometimes are what, in hindsight, can bring a little joy to our life and we don't take ourselves so seriously. So we love talking about them and just kind of celebrating. Sometimes it doesn't always go perfectly. Yeah. And if you're in HR and something crazy and terrible has happened to you, you're not alone. Yeah. It's not just you. It's not just you. Maybe it feels like it. But anyway, and don't forget, we've got the $10,000 contest coming up. You submit the story. The best story of the year wins $10,000. We love it. We want to give it away. So it can be a guest segment.

00:02:45 You can submit a story in writing. You can be anonymous where we don't say your name. We just tell your story. But you submit it. The best one of the year wins $10,000. When do you guys determine the winner? I think we're on, this is show 48. Right. So we have essentially four shows until we've done a year's new. You said the first year. Yeah. Then we'll do it. So we were just talking about this. It's like, we've got to go through, figure out the process we're going to go through to kind of pull out and tease out all the sports here. Yeah. And then we've got to figure out how we're going to give away $10,000. Right. Yeah. Are we going to, we're going to, you know. A big giant check. Yeah. The person's. Have it rain from the ceiling. The person's in California. Are we going to go.

00:03:26 Well, fine. If you need me on the committee, I will nominate myself to go to California. We don't know if we're going to take cameras and we want to do it that way to what, you know, we want to sit down with that person and do. We could have a full interview. We'd have them here and just like tell them that they're in-person guests on the show. And then we pull a string and confetti comes out, but it's all cash. Cash confetti. Yeah. It sucks. Yeah. Okay. Well, if you're watching. So you really need to come here. Yeah. I don't have time. You really need to. Are you sure? Yeah. So if you're out there, we call you and say, you should come to our office and be a guest. You should be. Don't be scared. Oh, wait. Your lucky day. Your lucky day. That's right. I actually look forward to it. It's going to be fun. That'll be fun.

00:04:06 I think it's a great idea. Yeah. We could turn it into a fun video. Yeah. Do what? We could turn it into a fun video. Yeah. No, we should. And then do like, I'm going to. My bet is if you got one, you got 10. Yes. Great stories. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And so what we really find is like just spend more time, you know, with someone who's a great storyteller to just tell more stories. We were recording some social media videos this morning and like we, you know, we react to different social videos. And one of the last ones we did was like, it was an HR person. And she's like, if you're in HR, you probably have a story. Everybody has a story. And that was like just her whole video. And we kind of referred to the back of the podcast. And I think she had like hundreds of comments from people like, oh yes, I do. Oh yeah. I got to start. So it's, it's a whole thing.

00:04:47 Yeah. Yeah. So that's why we do the podcast. Yeah. So, um, I'm going to get started with these stories from, for today, but, uh, this is one cigarette away, one cigarette away from a disaster at a chemical plant. Oh gosh. Chemical plant. This sounds scary. Yeah. So I, so I run a quality control. I run quality control at a chemical plant and we got a new production worker, uh, one morning, you know, seems like a quiet guy shows up on time, seems perfectly normal. And we run him through the safety briefing. Like we do everyone. Right. And I want to be clear about what that briefing covers because it's not a quick overview. Uh, we work with flammable and volatile chemicals every single day and the facility, you know,

00:05:31 simply reflects how dangerous that is. So there are warning signs on the walls, on the equipment, on the doors, on the floor. I mean, if you spent 10 minutes walking through that building, uh, in your first shift, you would have, you know, it would be very clear, um, understanding that you're working around, you know, certain things, uh, and, and there are certain things, uh, you know, that are dangerous and there's certain things that are absolutely off the table. So, you know, he nods along during the safety, uh, you know, uh, training seems to take it in and, and, you know, then he heads out to the floor. Uh, and around 10 AM, he heads out toward the loading area, uh, for his break. A few seconds later, I watch him light a cigarette next to 10, uh, next to a 10,000 liter

00:06:15 acetone tank. Oh no. What's he doing? That's crazy. Imagine you're watching him. He's over there. It's like slow though. You're like. It's like a zoo lander. Yeah, running at it. Yeah. The gasoline fight. That's crazy. I don't have a great way to describe what it feels like to watch that happen in real time. Yeah. Because your brain takes a second to like catch up to what your eyes are seeing. Like, no, that's not happening. By the time it did, someone had already moved toward him and he was being walked out. Yeah. So, uh, the whole thing from cigarette determination was under 60 seconds. I'm surprised he didn't get tackled. Maybe he just did. I know.

00:06:56 He was like, no conversations. They didn't do any write-ups. There was no second chance. Come with me. You know, this. You're done. Just done. Wow. Right. So, nothing to discuss. That could have been so bad. You can't mess with that kind of stuff. That's crazy. He said, this person writes, I thought, I thought about that. This meant, you know, I don't work in that kind of environment. So, I really don't understand, you know, what, what that would be like to be like how dangerous maybe that would be. Like, hey, you could not just kill yourself. Like, a lot of people around you. And this person writes, I've thought about that. A lot over the years. So, this was so shocking. Yeah. That this person still thinks about this incident of, you know, the slow motion probably watching him go to light the cigarettes sitting next to 10,000 liters.

00:07:40 Light flashing for your eyes. This kind of thing. Yeah. You know. Man. And he just, he says, the part that gets him is that he didn't seem the guy was defiant, didn't feel like he was a defiant person, you know. And he just, he wasn't ignoring the rules on purpose. He just generally hadn't connected any of the safety information to smoking a cigarette. I'm sure there were like no smoking signs everywhere. Probably. I was going to say, I wonder if they added that to their policy in their handbook. Yeah. Probably. Don't even bring cigarettes into the building. I'm sure there were signs everywhere that said no open flame, no smoking, you know. Right. But. Yikes. Some people are just force of habit, I guess. And I said, you know, like, I see it, I see it, but I'm.

00:08:21 Right. I see your signs all the time and I don't read them. Yeah. That's crazy. Man. I don't know. Wow. Scary environment. Yeah. Yes. So the next story that we say, I like that story, you know, just around the idea that, you know, you do all the training, you do, you take care, everybody is thorough. Like, don't kill us all here. And then still people. Sometimes it doesn't go as planned. It just doesn't take. Yeah. Right. I don't know. Wow. All right. So this next story, he trashed the company online his first day on the job. Wow. So, so most people, when they start a new job, try to make a decent first impression.

00:09:07 Right. So they show up on time, they ask some reasonable questions, you know, get a feel for the place, all that kind of stuff. You know, what they generally do not do is go home mid afternoon and start publicly insulting the company online. Oh man. So this one made it through, this one made it through orientation and into the first afternoon when someone on the existing team did what people do now and looked him up online. So they're meeting him, you know, on the first day. And so, yeah, that's what they do. They're like, oh, well, okay. Let me check him out. See what's up. Yeah. And he had already posted about the company on social media. That was fast. Not a neutral first day post, not a thumbs up and a caption about new beginnings. He was actively bad mouthing the business already.

00:09:50 Man. By name. With specifics based on things. He's tagging them on his ear. I've heard during his first few hours, you know, at the place. He hadn't even made it through a full day, through a full work day. This is on his lunch tray. He's trashed his lunch. That's crazy. What in the world? He's taking selfies. Yeah. You know, with his manager. I hate this guy. He's in the company bathroom. Yeah. You know. Yeah. That's crazy. When it brought this up, when it was brought to his attention, he seemingly genuinely surprised that anyone had found the post. Which is, oh, this is public? Yeah. Which is the part that still gets me.

00:10:31 He appeared to believe that a public account searchable by his name was somehow private space. Oh, my God. Where his thoughts about his brand new employer would go unnoticed. That's crazy. He did not come to work. The next day. I love how that's what he was worried about. Was like, I mean, hello. You probably should be focusing. Yeah. This was a terrible mistake. I was just kind of, I don't know. I don't know how you, I mean, you're going to get fired. Yeah. Yeah. That would infuri me, to be honest. Oh, you guys found that? Yeah. It's like on Instagram. How do I change my settings to be private? Yeah. Yeah. Asking a little bit too late. Yeah. That's crazy. I still, it still gets me that people are still put off. And this wasn't even a formal social media search.

00:11:14 I mean, this wasn't the company doing a background social media search. It was, you know, I arrive and my coworkers see me and they get to know me. Right. It's super natural for them to look them up. You do that with everybody, you know, nowadays. You just look, you know, check up, you know, check them out on Instagram. And, you know, wherever else you're going to find them. And, you know. Yeah. There you are. Yeah. Because BeachX has like really strong in-depth social media background screening. And so, it's like when you're interviewing a candidate as part of it, you can just do a, it's super high tech. It's not just Googling their name. It's like it finds even secret profiles and stuff like that. And just to flag behaviors. Yeah. So, if there's violent or offensive type of content in the past that they've posted or done, it just lets the employer know about it.

00:12:00 It's very basic. But it sounds like this. Yeah. It's just like, it's just right there. It's not even like an in-depth search from 10 years ago. It's like, it sounds like he's tagging them of like how much he hates this company like right on Facebook or whatever. So, just like, I mean, it's crazy because you could do a super high tech in-depth search or something like this. Didn't even take that. And just like it's right there on page one of social media. Now, we've had some people do some posting on day one or maybe day two. Like, we had one employee come and he did a whole, my first day of work. Yes. Yes. Right? And I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I was like, you know, because he. It was a positive thing. Yes. He showed himself like leaving his house, getting in his car, you know.

00:12:43 And he was a recent college grad. And I just thought. Yeah. I think it just made me remember back to like getting out of college and going to a job. Yes. You know, like my first real job, the very first time. Just how stoked I was to be like going. You know, my life is beginning after college. And so, I kind of loved his post. It was like, it showed me, not only was he creative. Yeah. It showed me a level of enthusiasm. I was excited to see. But on the flip side, how would you react if somebody works here day one, goes home and just like, oh, I hated my first day. I hate this company. Like, how did that even make you feel?

00:13:23 Like, what do you even do with that? It's like, that's crazy. I would fire them instantly. Hey, come in. We need to have a conversation. We made it. One, I would go right back to the hiring manager and go, how? How does this happen? Right. Right. How did you? There had to have been a flag. Yeah. How did, this is crazy town. Yeah. Zero to a hundred. I can't imagine, especially on day one. If that happened at any point, even five years into somebody's employment, that'd be crazy. But day one's a whole nother thing. Yeah. Before we dive back into the chaos on the bad hire, this episode is brought to you by B-Checks. Hiring shouldn't feel like rolling the dice. Background checks should come with great tech, seamless integration, and customer service that delivers. That's B-Checks.

00:14:04 Lightning fast results, unmatched accuracy, built in fraud prevention. We help you hire the right people. Now, B-Checks plugs into over 100 H-R-I-S and A-T-S systems. So your background checks run smooth, fast, and backed by top level service. Protect your team. Protect your reputation. Protect your sanity. Go to B-Checks.io. That's B-C-H-E-X.io. Yeah. Let me jump to this next segment because it's Jason Bivens and we've seen him on the show before with the guest segment. And he's got great stories, but the story was she was mean to everyone, including the owner of the company.

00:14:46 Oh. Oh, gosh. Not a good start here. So you guys know Jason from Great Hire Staffing. He's one of the co-founders. And so let's check out what he's got to say. I've been fooled before. A recruiter that, you know, all the clients liked her. Awesome. But she was really mean to one assistant recruiter helping her. And this guy was ready to quit. And I had a heart-to-heart with her. And even I finally saw what other people were talking about, that she's mean. And she literally ended up being mean to me, the owner of the company, telling me I'm an idiot on the phone. So that was a first for me. And, of course, that we ended up parting ways for sure.

00:15:27 And I was trying to explain that, okay, this junior person, their whole job is to help you. And that's what they're trying to do. But they have a lot of questions and, you know, they're a little bit needy. But you have to look at it tense, right? This person's trying to help you. And this recruiter just wasn't having it. People like that can't keep around it. It creates a toxic culture. You can teach the skills. But you can't have that toxic culture. It will absolutely gut your business. Yeah, we talk about that a lot. Yeah. I mean, it's one of those where she's a good recruiter, right? Probably a performer. And that will absolutely test your commitment to culture. Yeah. When someone's crushing in their numbers, but they're terrible for your culture.

00:16:09 Yeah. Yes. Right. Yeah. And where do you draw that line of, you know, you want someone high performing, but then they're calling you an idiot. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully those are a little more obvious. Yeah. Because sometimes we do talk about in these conversations, even outside the podcast, it's like, what are we, what are you looking for? You know, it's like you want somebody who's proficient and skilled and can get the job done, but also somebody who helps everybody else around them to, to be good at their job and lifted. And everything from encouraged and happy to also empowered and good at their jobs too. Like that kind of thing. You know, so it's like, if you find somebody who's good at their own job, but then they make everybody else, like they, they suck the life of it out of every room they walk into. You don't want to have somebody like that.

00:16:50 Right. Right. Especially when it's that blunt of like, you're an idiot to the owner of the company. Yeah. That's a little bit obvious. Is that what he said? Yes. She called him an idiot? Yeah. Yeah. To him. Yeah. That's crazy. Called him an idiot over the phone. Yeah. That's what he said. Yeah. Yeah. So I, yeah, that's never a good, that's never a good. Right. A never good win. In case anyone was wondering. Don't call, don't call the same. That's always mean. Going around and. Don't be mean. Don't be mean. Name call. Just don't be mean. Yeah. That's pretty, pretty basic. Be kind. Yeah. Surprise. It's better. It's better. Yeah. All right, Nathan. All right. I got a few stories. I got more food theme stories. So this is the subway manager who got robbed by two different employees. So my first job was at Subway. I worked my way up to be the store manager.

00:17:32 So one day the owner calls me and he wants to know why so many orders are being edited. And I had no idea. We found out that each day after I left, one of my guys on my team was going back into the system and editing the completed orders and rerunning them so that he could collect the subway points on his account. And so we, we let him go, uh, and brought on somebody else who later ended up deleting orders and pocketing the cash from the register. And so he thought that if you delete it from the point of sale system, that it's gone. But just because you can't see them on that one screen anymore, it doesn't mean they're not like logged into a database. Right. And they're all still there. So I had two back-to-back hires at my subway job who were both robbing me.

00:18:13 So like, it's, it's kind of like, I don't know if you guys seen Arrested Development where like they would have the banana and they scan the banana, like throw it in the trash and take a dollar just to show that like there's a sale, but they're just stealing from the company. That's what he's pretty much doing. So it's just like two thefts back-to-back or two thieves back-to-back. So just some bad hires. That's great. So I wonder if the guy who got all the points, like had to come in to use his points. He went into another subway location. You're not idiots. It's horrible. They get to go to the next door. Right, right. Yeah. He rolls in there and he goes, you know, he's like, for his car, you know, it's like 1,236,000. Yeah. How'd you get all those? Yeah. Anything for a free sub. I mean, at least he wasn't stealing money.

00:18:54 Just, you know, just subway points. I don't know. That's kind of money. I guess, I guess. To convert it into food. I guess that is true. That's pretty low. It's the same as, it's the same as stealing a meal out of the place. He wasn't really loved subway. Look, I hate to say it, kind of creative. Not okay. Yeah. More inventive. But, I mean. The second guy was just only cash. Yeah. The first guy was a little more inventive, I guess. Yeah. You need to take that guy and put him in your risk management department. Right, right, right. Yeah. Yeah. Anything for free subway, I guess. Okay. So, my second story is, he drove off. By the way, I love subway. Yeah. Shout out to subway. You guys like subway? Subway? That's all right. Oh. I grew up eating subway. That was the only sub place I went to.

00:19:35 Yeah. And so, now it's like, I just prefer to go to the other places because I've had so much subway. Do you guys remember Quiznos? Yeah, bro. I was a Quiznos girly. Quiznos. I don't think I've ever been to Quiznos. That throwback. Toasted? I don't know if they still exist. Yeah. I think they're out of business now. Oh, yeah. Well. Should have bought more Quiznos. Should have sold some points from there, so it could have gone more. Yeah. She's still got her fan club card with a thousand points on it. She's trying to find a Quiznos. That she earned, honestly. Yes. Yes. Always. All right. Here's my second story. So, he drove off without the trailer and almost hurt everybody on the team. So, we have a new guy who volunteers on his first day to pull a semi-trailer to the loading dock. He said he's done it plenty of times when he was in the army and he knows exactly what

00:20:19 he's doing. So, I tell him no. There's a process. You have to be checked out by the safety team before you touch anything that size. It's not personal. It's just policy. And a semi-trailer in the wrong hands could kill people. So, he said he understands. I go back to work. Five minutes later, I look up and he's behind the wheel of the semi-trailer. So, I start walking toward him and I had a whole speech ready about safety protocols, liability, and about how none of his past experience changed anything and about how we do things here. I was maybe halfway there when the trailer started to move. Here's the thing. He could drive a semi. I'll give him that. And the tractor moved exactly the way it was supposed to. But what he didn't know, what apparently nobody had told him, was how to verify the trailer

00:21:05 actually locked to the fifth wheel before pulling to the dock. So, it's like one wheel's locked and where the others are free. So, the trailer came free and slid backward off the dock with a sound that brought everyone on the floor to a complete screeching stop. Nobody was hurt, but that was the only good thing that came from that experience. So, he sat in the cab for a moment after it happened, looking in the mirrors, processing what had just happened to him. And by the time I got there, I didn't need to say much. He climbed down, handed over his badge, and left. And that was the end of that. So, the only good thing he even got fired, technically. He just like handed the badge. I think I'm done. Wow. So, I guess he's trying to prove something that I really know what I'm doing. And that didn't go. He's like, I got this.

00:21:45 Yeah. Honestly, I caught on to, it's not personal, it's policy. I feel like we should get that on a shirt. Yeah. It has a nice ring. It does have a nice ring. Yeah. It's just what it is. It's like personal. It's policy. It's like, no. It's not special. It's just policy. Yeah. I think some ego came into it is what it sounded like. It's like, oh, I know what I'm doing. Yeah. I got this. Kylie, you got to get that. You got to go to marketing. You got to get that. I know. I know. We should make it happen. We should make that available. It's not personal. It's policy. The bad hire. Yeah. They'll be on our next shirt. So, truth of things came out of that story, I guess. Yeah. That's true. Nobody got hurt and we got a shirt. Know when just to turn your badge in.

00:22:27 Yeah. You don't even need to just turn it in. Yeah. Know that and then, you know. Right. Yeah. Take that out. Personal policy. Love it. All right. This is my last story. This one's kind of sad. It's called, We Grieved With Her For No Reason. Oh, no. So, I manage a warehouse and one of my employees who is friendly, she's well-liked, and the kind of person who remembered everybody's birthday always brought in food on holidays, she announces that she's adopted a child. So, the whole department is genuinely happy for her. I'm happy for her. She comes in one day and tells us that there was a house fire and she lost everything. The department does what good coworkers do. Someone passes around a collection jar. People organize a drive. Everyone gives generously because they like her.

00:23:08 They want to help. And she receives a significant amount of money. A few weeks later, she comes in quietly and says that her child had just passed away. She doesn't go into much detail, but just that the child is gone. The department grieves with her and another collection with more money is passed around and more money is collected. So, then HR calls me into a meeting and walks me through what actually happened in the past weeks. There's actually no adoption. There's no house fire and there's no child. Every piece of those stories has been fabricated to extract money from the people around her that cared about her. So, she sat across from me and from everybody on that floor and led us to believe that a

00:23:50 child came into her life and had passed away just so she could get more money. So, I terminated her immediately and there may have been legal consequences beyond that, but I don't know the full outcome is what they said. So, what I do know is that I had to go back out onto that warehouse and tell people who genuinely grieved and cried with her about all these terrible things that happened that it was all a lie. And so, I've hired a lot of people over the years. I've made mistakes, but I've never had to tell a room full of good people that they mourned somebody who was never actually there. Wow. So, isn't that insane? Just the lengths that people would go to just to get a couple buckets of cash? Kali, this is not the first fake death story on the show.

00:24:31 Like, we've heard this a couple times. A couple times. Yeah. Just for some money. Sad. Yeah. Or time off. Or just PTO. I mean, or just time off. Like, I need some time off and so I'm going to say, I mean, one show it was the husband. My husband died, you know, and then a couple weeks later the husband calls in and someone answers and asks for it. It's like, can I tell her who's calling? Yeah, it's her husband. Yeah. It's like, you died three weeks ago. Yeah. Right, right. Yeah. Wow. So, it was the sympathy. They were looking for the sympathy of that. Taking advantage of all these kind people. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty extreme. I mean, yeah, again, like you said, it's like taking advantage of the fact that it's like

00:25:12 a sensitive spot. It's like a child. It's an adoption. It's a house fires. Very like extreme stories just to get some money. We had somebody in the hurricane here a couple years ago where a tree fell and basically turned their home completely unlovable and crushed an entire room and she, you know, lost all of her clothes and all those things. And, you know, we put together, you know, some people came together here at the company and immediately wanted to try to like, you know, help her and help her family because she's, you know, her parents were there as well. And, you know, I just think about how everyone rallied around that person and how kind they

00:25:53 were and caring and compassionate and, you know, um, and felt good about it. Right. Right. And then to think that all of that would be just be just snatched away from them to just feel, you know, to have it, you know. Yeah. Fraud committed on basically. You know, I, I, I guess my message would just still be kind hearted. Mm-hmm. Still be kind hearted. Still help the next person. And try not to, you know, give up on others. Yeah. Because I could see why that would kind of probably taint someone's idea of giving back and being kind. Cause it's like, well, wait a minute. I was just stabbed in the back. Yeah. But. Yeah. That's hard like to maintain empathy and sympathy and kindness, even when like terrible experiences

00:26:34 like that happen to you just cause it might almost kind of take away part of that kind part of your heart. But yeah, like you said, just. I always say guilt is how it makes you feel, not because how they might use it. Yeah. Right. You know, it's, you do it for your own heart cause it makes your own heart feel good. And that way if they misuse it or whatever, it's, it doesn't take away the joy you get, you get out of giving. Right. And there might be people every day who are taking advantage of others, but that does, that's not a reason that you shouldn't just continue to live, you know, lovingly and care for people, especially when they're actually going through difficult times like that. And so, but yeah, that was a sad story. Well. Still be kind. Yeah. Jeez. All right, Kylie. Okay. My turn.

00:27:15 Go for it. Okay. So my first story is drunk, insistent in 12 hours too early. Oh, that's a good title. So I'm running the night shift at our factory one summer evening and we've got the side doors propped open for airflow. Not glamorous, but it helps. Through one of those open doors, a man walks in off the street. He is visibly, unambiguously drunk. Not borderline, not questionable, staggering, glassy eyed, completely loose. He walks across the production floor like he owns the place, striking up conversations with my workers, cheerful and entirely out of context.

00:27:58 Oh gosh. I know. I go over to handle it. I tell him he can't be in here. He tells me that he's supposed to start work that night. I tell him I don't have anyone starting and he tells me I'm wrong. We go back and forth like this for five or 10 minutes, me explaining that he needs to leave, him genuinely insisting he's an employee who has shown up for his shift. I finally tell him to call the office in the morning to sort it out and I walk him back to the door. The next day, the first shift supervisor mentions that a new hire was a no-show. I tell him what had happened the night before and we compare schedules.

00:28:39 He had shown up for his shift. He'd just shown up 12 hours early for the wrong shift, completely drunk and argued with me about it for the better part of 10 minutes before I had to escort him out. That's terrible. His employment ended before it technically began. There's a lot of those. No onboarding, paperwork, no badge photo, no first day orientation. He walked in through a propped open side door at midnight smelling like a bar, insisted he was punctual and was let go without ever spending a single official minute on the clock. He was a no-call, no-show for his actual shift the following day.

00:29:22 Hopefully, he at least slept it off. No, at least he got there early. You know, some people show up late and he got there 12 hours early for his first shift. Yeah. That's the only redeeming pec-ary. That's crazy. She was like, now you do not have a job here. Right. He's like, oh, you're wrong. Yeah. Wow. That's crazy. Yeah. That's, that's boring. What's going through his mind or just like showing up drunk at all? Yeah. It's like just something to take the edge off. It was midnight. Blackout. Yeah. Okay. It's not like it was new and that would have been really bad. Yeah. Yeah. That's insane. Oh, wow. Yeah. At least he showed up early. Yeah. That's crazy. What else you got? Okay. Second story. He ran from the police and straight to work.

00:30:05 Okay. I'll take a errand time maybe. Right. These are just, wow. Showing up to work in style. So this guy was, by all accounts, very into his car. This was known about him going in. People who are very into their cars have a particular relationship with the speed limit that the rest of us don't fully share. In retrospect, putting this person behind the wheel of a company vehicle was perhaps an optimistic call on our part. He gets pulled over, or rather is supposed to get pulled over, doing twice the posted speed limit on a public road. The patrol car lights him up.

00:30:46 He looks in the rear view mirror, processes the situation, and makes a decision. He doesn't pull over. He's going to go for it. Yeah. Oh, gosh. What follows is a police chase that winds through the surrounding streets and ends somehow at our office. What? He pulls into the underground parking structure, kills the engine, and apparently operates under the belief that if he sits very still in the dark, the situation will resolve itself on its own. Yeah. It doesn't resolve itself on its own. Police are quite committed to the resolution process. I want to be clear that this was not a brief blink-and-you-missed-it chase. There were actual minutes during which a colleague could have looked out the window and watched their co-worker being pursued by law enforcement at significant speed throughout the surrounding neighborhood.

00:31:37 There was time to process what was happening. Surprise, he was terminated, which goes without saying. But the part that I keep coming back to isn't the chase or the parking structure or even the sitting quietly in the dark waiting for things to improve. It's the destination. Yeah. When running from police at high speed, his brain said, you know what? Go to work. Go to work. Yeah. He had been employed there for a matter of days. And in a moment of genuine crisis, the building, our building, was the place you decided to go. Oh. That's nice. Yeah. I prefer to read that as a story about spectacularly poor judgment. Yeah. It's a much simpler story that way.

00:32:19 Yeah. That's crazy. I thought he was going to just like literally pull in, go upstairs, go sit in his cubicle. What's up, guys? How's it going? Right. Right. Hey, somebody asked to say I've been here since eight. That's right. Just go and just hide in his cubicle. I think my car was stolen, but I'm not 100% certain. Right. It's all just going to blow over. That's great. I mean, I. It's crazy. Yeah. I don't even know what to say. I can't imagine looking out the window and just seeing like one of our coworkers just buzzing down the street. Is that Joe from accounting? Yeah. What's he doing here? It's a nice car. Yeah. That's crazy. Well, yeah. I guess he had just an instinct to go to work and it's a familiar place, I guess. I don't know. Yeah. You know how sometimes people, you hear those stories where someone's going above the speed

00:33:02 limit, but it's like, my wife's about to give birth. I have to get to the hospital. I imagine if he was like, I got to clock in. Yeah. I got to get to work. I'm going to be late. It's 9.04. Yeah. I got the 9.05 in one minute. I got up there. Yeah. Oh my goodness. That's wild. Okay. My third story. Every red flag led to the same place. Okay. Okay. So I want to be careful on how I tell this one because I genuinely believe that people deserve to be treated fairly at work and I'm not someone who dismisses a colleague's concerns lightly, but this was different from anything I'd seen before. So from the moment she arrived, everything was a crisis.

00:33:46 She burst into tears over things the rest of us genuinely could not identify as distressing. She accused colleagues of victimizing her in a way she declined to specify. She was pulled into a project, produced almost nothing of her own, took a co-worker's existing work, reformatted it slightly, and then demanded partial credit for it. She filed formal grievances, multiple, against multiple team members. The HR team spent weeks reviewing documentation about incidents that, from the outside, appeared to be the ordinary friction of a normal office trying to get work done.

00:34:26 And then she invited herself to an office on the other side of the country. Nobody is entirely sure how this happened or who she told or what she said to arrange this. She was never asked to go. She organized on her own her travel. She showed up to this distant office unannounced. And while she was there, she made sexual advances towards the senior director, who was married and who had not asked for any of this, and who was by all accounts deeply uncomfortable with the situation. What the heck? What the heck? She was fired for misconduct shortly after. And for those of us who had watched this preceding week's unfold, this felt like, less like a

00:35:11 surprise and more like a conclusion that had become inevitable sometime around the third grievance. What I kept thinking about now is the trajectory of it all. The crying, the accusations, the stolen credit, the grievances, the uninvited cross-country trip, the director. Right, yeah. Every step felt impossible to believe, and yet each one was immediately followed by the next. She escalated so consistently and so relentlessly that by the end, she flew to another city and made advances on a senior director somehow felt like a logical next step. Yeah. It was not logical, and we all have to stop being surprised.

00:35:55 Yeah. Yeah. That's a good one for the HR people, because there's always some kind of red flag most of the time. And sometimes it's easier to sweep down under the rug. I'm sure it's fine, but it sounds like that's one and the next and one and the next and the next. And it's like, okay, I can't ignore this any longer. We've got to let this person go. The HR pro sees that, and they see where this is going way in advance. They can't get in front of it. It has to play out to some level. Yeah. You know they can see this stuff like, oh, no. Maybe somebody more junior would be like, oh, I'm sure it's fine. It's just, you know, one thing, just laying out a grievance or whatever. It's not like she was laying out a grievance, like filing HR grievances when somebody, like,

00:36:36 I don't know, took the last water bottle in the fridge or something like that is what it sounded like. It's like just normal life, like a completed HR. Yeah. And was there just like multiple locations of the office and she just went to like the Phoenix location or something? Yeah. She just went to a vacation. Yeah. Or maybe she looked in the corporate directory while that guy was, you know, he's good looking. Or she's like, I ran out of possible complaints. Maybe I'll just go to the next one. She's like, I'm going to move, got to move over to the next. Wow. Wow. That's a good lesson, though. That's crazy. Yeah. Nice, nice job. Good and good stories. Yeah. I love it. Thanks. Yeah, thanks for coming on. That was cool. Exciting. It's fun. These are crazy. Yeah. Yeah. It is kind of exciting. Well, that's it for us today. So, yeah, thanks for listening. Yeah. To The Bad Hire, we love it.

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