She Used 20 Fake Names to Get Hired [The Bad Hire Ep. 42]

00:00:00 I'm told the guy who's supposed to be working had urinated on over $50,000 worth of vendor product and signage the night before. 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. Oh. I'm your host, Ken Monroe, and every week we dive into real-life stories from the wild world of work 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.

00:00:42 Let's get started. Hey, everyone, and welcome back to The Bad Hire, the show with the best stories from the wild world of work. How are you guys doing? I'm here with Morgan and Emma. What's up? Hey. I'm just thinking about last episode. You said Morga. Yeah. Yes, I did. Is this Morga? Yep. You would think I would... Know my name? Yeah, me too. Know better. Yeah. I'm just kidding. Oh, my gosh. Hey, you guys know the drill. So, every week we dive into the wildest, the weirdest, what? I don't know. I'm sorry. Just keep going. And the most jaw-dropping hiring fails from offices, job sites, organizations all over the country.

00:01:27 We hear some really great stories of just like, you know, first day flame outs and OG, you know, burnouts. And they're really funny. And really, we just get to get a look at what, you know, being in HR, you know, what the real life of HR is like, how they handle so many challenges and what a challenging job HR is, you know. And being a manager, because a lot of the stories are submitted by managers. What shocks me is a lot of stories are submitted by employees who are seeing another employee. Yeah. And the insight into that, whether you're an HR leader or CEO or executive or manager or whatever, is really seeing the impact of having a bad employee of how traumatic it is for the other employee or the nearby employee.

00:02:15 Because they write these stories, you're like, wow. You know, they were really, you know, harmed by this thing, apparently, emotionally. And sometimes it's just funny. So they're just. Yeah. Yeah. But you get a sense for like, just how challenging talent acquisition is, how hard it is to find great people. When I'm around other business owners, I hear that all the time. You know, it's like. Just a constant complaint of how hard it is to find what. I'm laughing at this story that you're about to read here in a minute. Oh, you were ahead of me. See, you're the girl in class. It's like always reading ahead. Teachers saying something. You were reading ahead, too. Literally. Five seconds ago.

00:02:56 Before the show started. Oh, my gosh. The show is rolling. Let's play back the clip. I'm just kidding. All right. We got Casey. Tell me, who did Casey? I believe Nathan did. But we've done a couple of clips by him already. Yeah. So let's listen to what Casey's got to say on his guest segment. We had this engineer whose resume just looked perfect coming from, you know, a hot new startup. And he was like, oh, yeah, I basically built it. I basically set all the infrastructure up, ran it full stack. It was my whole project. Didn't work out there. They weren't paying me enough. Classic. Didn't work out with that candidate. But we actually ended up talking to that startup later on as a potential client.

00:03:39 And I met that hiring manager. And he was like, yeah, we had this that I just fired. Almost deleted the whole code base. Trying to take credit for it. And the lead engineer there was brilliant. And it was very obvious that the young buck was lying. I think we have. Have we? I think we have. We have? Yeah. I think we heard that one last time. But it's okay. It's so great each time. Oh, I don't. Oh, it must have been on an episode that I was on. Yes, it was in our episode. Yeah. Oh. It's okay. Sorry about that. It's okay. Totally okay. But I watched them, though. Yeah, it just shows me that you just don't really watch the shows.

00:04:20 Oh, my gosh. Please don't start. I'll just stop doing the script altogether. And you can just free it. No, no, no, no, no. We love it. We love it. You're doing good. No, but regardless, the story is still funny. Right? And I'm just always like, why do people lie? No, I don't know. Gosh. Especially when he almost broke the whole thing. And I think, I don't know if this is like a shorter version of the clip we saw last time, too. It feels like it. Because I feel like it was longer. And I feel like he explained like he had copied it all and then tried to paste it and sent them a pasted version of it. I thought that was a separate story. I thought it was like another story that he had told. It's the same one.

00:05:00 Because I watched the beginning of all the clips and they didn't start the same. Yeah. Yeah. The other one was like two minutes. Well, it was definitely longer than 40 seconds, I want to say. And he was talking about how he pasted the code. It's the same guy, but I think he like pasted the code a certain way. And then the people at the new company was like, this makes no sense. Well, didn't he tell a story about something about a background screen? Yes, that was a different story he told. We had two. Yeah, he has actually like pretty interesting stories. Yeah, he does. He's had his share of BSers in the interview room. For sure. You know, for sure. Before we dive back into the chaos on the bad hire, this episode is brought to you by B-Checks.

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00:06:25 We're going to keep them anonymous, but we don't tell their story. And, you know, hang on because this is, this is, this is a bit of a long story. But I was, as I was pre-reading it, it got to be pretty, got to be pretty funny. I love whoever submitted this story because I feel like I'd be friends with them just because how they tell the story. Like, it's like, they just want to tell you their whole life story with it. You know what I mean? I love it. Like, I eat this kind of stuff up, so thank you. I needed this today. I just learned something about you. And now there's a deeper understanding in my life right now because you said that. That I like to know about people? Sorry. No, that it's someone who would like to tell you, like, every detail. Yeah, I do. I like to know every detail about somebody.

00:07:07 I tell every detail, too. I'm like, this literally has absolutely nothing to do with the story. And I feel like it needs to be included anyway. My son is like that. Exactly. That's why I'm, like, yeah. That's why me and your son are long. The couch was blue. Actually, well, it wasn't blue. It was a shade of blue. It was kind of like this other. I got that couch. I got that couch. I got that couch. I got that couch. You know how we got that couch? You know? Yeah. That's how I tell stories. Stories about going to Disney. He starts out with a couch. Yeah. There's, like, a meme, and it's this guy who's, like, doing an interview for a documentary, and he's like, so we moved to LA. My father got a job at the Palm Restaurant. And then it's like, he's telling this story that has nothing to do with the documentary

00:07:51 at all. But it's like, so people would put that over, like, memes and be like, this is me explaining my whole life story to somebody I just met. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to see the clip to understand it. But it's like, it makes no sense why he's talking about him moving to LA. So, but yeah. So I moved to LA. Exactly. The story is from 10 years ago. Okay, there we go. When I moved to LA. Yeah, there you go. But it still sticks with me whenever I think back on my time to Las Vegas. Back in 2015, I was dating a guy who was chasing, wait, I was dating a guy who was chasing his dream of becoming an MMA fighter. Sorry, I have to laugh. I now understand what you're talking about.

00:08:32 See? Because it has nothing to do. Does it? Maybe it does. I don't know. We haven't got to it yet. We haven't got to the part. I have to hear it. We were living in Southern California. And he kept making trips out to Vegas to network in the MMA world. Eventually he- Why do you network in the MMA world? I just- I want to know. He tells me he'd met Dana White. Oh, that's cool though. I mean- At a gym out there. Okay. Gotten a chance. I don't know if this, I don't know if that's true. Yeah. Eventually he tells me he met Dana White at a gym, gotten a chance to show off a little, you know, and was told that if he moved to Vegas, he would train at White's gym. He could. Okay, cool. And basically get taken under his wing so he moves. All right. I'm not sure how truthful this guy's been to his girlfriend.

00:09:14 Yeah. It takes me about eight months of interviews and applications before I land a job and an apartment in the city myself in Vegas. So my background was in customer service, private security. I'd been dispatching for a security company. The new job liked that I had some supervisory courses under my belt and it helped with new contracts before. So they bring me in as an operations manager. So it's a support role that also involved reaching out for new business. The company itself run by a husband and wife. Cool. I have no idea why this is relevant. He handled the... We're not hating on you, by the way. I'm thinking about this detail. We're not hating on you. He handled the high-end clients. He used to have details. Bodyguard type work for high rollers, politicians, and towns for the weekend.

00:09:58 She handled the property side, apartment complexes, shopping centers, convention center, the bargain bin side of the business. When I start, the person who had my job left weeks earlier. So there's really nobody who actually knows the role or how to train it. So instead, I get trained by this 65-year-old woman who handles scheduling and has been there for 20 years. Oh, wow. With a big convention coming up in two weeks, the plan is for me just to help her with scheduling for this first event and learn everything else afterwards. So just get to know that. So here's the first red flag. Their scheduling system is a giant sheet of graph paper and a pencil. Names written, erased, written over and over until it's basically completely eligible.

00:10:42 She has me call people one by one to check availability and write them into the schedule. Sounds simple enough until... What? That's so... That's such manual labor for... With 260. Okay. She's been doing it the same way for 20 years. She actually said that this was... Don't mess with her system. This was 10 years ago. Don't mess with her system. That's not the way we do it around here. Yeah. Okay. It's going to be really easy if we had the software to do this. That's not how we do it here. Sounds simple enough until I'm about 15 calls in and she starts looking over my shoulder telling me, hey, you're doing it wrong. This guy doesn't have a car. He'll never show up. This one right here has childcare issues. He's not going to... He's not reliable. This one's cousin is having an event that weekend.

00:11:24 So he'll just walk off the job. Meanwhile, every single... How did she know these people? She's been doing it 20 years. Does that convention? Yeah. Every single person I called told me that they were eager for the work. Several even said that it had been weeks since they'd gotten a call for work. And she's telling me... As she's telling me this, she's also erasing and rewriting the names I've already confirmed to the point where I can't even keep track of who I'd actually scheduled anymore. Eventually, I'm asked to send a mass email campaign to over 4,000 vendors attending the event, advertising our booths, security services brochures, and a note about how we'd service this event for 15 years. It actually works. I land these... I land three last-minute contracts, and I get some genuine praise for it.

00:12:06 For a minute, I think maybe this job is going to be... Maybe this job's going to work out. That's good. Day one of the event goes fine. I meet staff, walk the property, talk to the convention officials. By day three, someone doesn't show up for their shift. So I go cover it until a replacement arrives. When I get there, I'm told the guy who was supposed to be working had... I'm told the guy... Did you... I swear you give me these stories on purpose. Somebody submitted them. I'm told the guy who was supposed to be working... I'm told the guy who's supposed to be working had urinated on over $50,000 worth of vendor product in signage the night before.

00:12:47 How? How? How much did he pay? The site supervisor tells me completely unsurprised... I'll be honest, I didn't... That the same guy had done this exact... $50,000? This guy had done the exact thing the year before and gotten arrested for it. So there was video evidence and everything. Oh, jeez. The year before... Why was he back? It had been fired afterwards. So how was he on my schedule? Turns out the scheduling woman had never actually called the people I'd confirmed. She'd erased her names and replaced them with people she just assumed would show, including a guy who had been fired for public indecency and property damage the year before. My confirmed names never got canceled properly, so when they showed up, they were turned away for not going on the list...

00:13:32 for not being on the list. While the site was simultaneously understaffed because her names never got called at all. It was complete chaos. Vendors were furious. The convention center was starting to question whether we had our act together, and I was starting to question every decision that I'd made just going to work there. Three days later, I take a phone call. The guy on the line is asking for the scheduling woman by name. I tell him she's not available right now, but I can take a message. He explains he used to work as the operations man. My exact role. Years ago, before moving out of state for family reasons, and then recently had been called back to take the job again, was getting his affairs in order to move back to town.

00:14:14 Oh, sorry. The story is so good. It's just the detail. I love it. It's what makes the story so interesting. I said at the beginning, I would be friends with this person. I need to reach out to them personally. I wish they were mesmerized by their stories. He's just like, oh, my God. I'm so glad he was getting his life back in his affairs in order. Oh, I love it. To move back to Las Vegas. I was talking to my own replacement while I still had the job. Oh, no. It turns out the scheduling woman and this guy were old friends,

00:14:57 and she had been pushing the owners to bring him back before I ever even applied because nobody else could train a new hire. But when my application came in and my old employer gave me a glowing reference, they hired me instead and just told her since she was close with him, she'd be the one to train me in the meantime, fully intending to swap me out once he was ready to come back. And they didn't tell her? Well, apparently the older lady sabotaged him. Oh. I quit not long after and moved to another state, eventually landing the government job to get back on my feet. I am endlessly thankful I didn't stay.

00:15:39 Ten years in that place would have absolutely decimated my soul. What about the MMA boyfriend? I was just thinking the same thing. Where did he go? What happened to him? Is he fighting in the MMA now? I need to know. He's under Dana White's wing. Apparently. I just want to know how to say how one person pees on $50,000 of material. Two years in a row. How much? Two years in a row. Why? Didn't they say that he did the same thing the year before? Yes. Did they say that? I mean, this story. Why? This story. I'm not making. Listen. I'm not making funny at this person. No, this is a great story. You might have spent $10,000.

00:16:21 This is one of the best stories I have heard that were submitted to us. I was hired to work for the security company. And the lady there sabotaged me and was trying to get the person who had left earlier. Yeah. And I ended up being just used to bridge the gap to get that person there. But we wouldn't have known about the man who peed. We wouldn't have known about her boyfriend. You wouldn't have known about that. You wouldn't have known about the boyfriend. I wouldn't have heard about Dana White. You wouldn't have known that the guy who was replacing her is getting his life back together after moving out of state. Yeah. I loved this story. Thank you to the person that sent this. You are in the running, honey. You are in the running. This is one of my favorite stories. Oh, my God. People are wasting that right now to write highly complex, crazy stories.

00:17:05 That's what her and I really vibe with. So, you know what? You're good on our end. Yeah. I love it. All right. Here you go. Another story. This is a... How do we even move on from that? I don't know. I think we should just send the episode there, to be honest. Please comment on what happened to the boyfriend and his DNA. I want to know if he was telling the truth to you or if that was all a lie. Actually, I'm going to email you after this, since your email is on the form from where you submitted the story. I will be emailing you and asking what happened to your MMA follow-up. We have to tell her we had the most fun with her story ever. Yeah, literally. All right. Here we go. Story number three, in which there's, you know...

00:17:46 It's not submitted, so I guess... This wasn't submitted. Okay. Yeah. So, the first facility that hired her knew her by one name. The second facility knew her by a different one. Okay. Now getting that. The first facility knows her by one name. The second facility by another. The third, a different name altogether. None of them knew they were all hiring the same woman. Are we into another one of those stories? Possibly. We'll call her Daria. Daria? Daria? Daria. Daria sounds like... Daria. Daria. We'll call her Daria. She went by so many names, she probably answered it.

00:18:27 Sorry. She went by so many names, she probably answered almost anything at this point. What she was not, and has never been, is a licensed nurse in any state. What she apparently was extremely good at... Oh my God. ...was paperwork. Yeah. I think so. She used 20 different aliases. What? Seven separate social security numbers. What? She stole the professional credentials of four real nurses from southern states and used her documentation as if it were her own. She even built a fake LLC to deploy herself through staffing agencies. Oh my gosh. Which added a layer of legitimacy and made background sex even harder to trace back to her.

00:19:10 She walked into nursing homes, rehabilitation centers, and hospitals across six different states. Wow. She worked with vulnerable patients, elderly patients, people who couldn't always advocate for themselves. That's sad. Police say medications went missing at facilities. She worked out. Care was documented that may never have been actually given. She was finally called in April during a routine traffic stop. She gave the officer a false name. They ran it, and the whole thing started to unravel from there. She's now facing 43 counts, including endangering the welfare of care, of care-dependent persons, identity theft, forgery, and falsely pretending to hold a license.

00:19:50 Nine or more separate institutions hired her. Not one of them called her. The entire system that exists to protect those patients, credential verifications, license checks, background screening, she beat it every single time at every single facility. Twenty names, seven social security numbers, not one employer who ran a check she couldn't clear. That's concerning. Wow. That is very concerning. What background screening provider is this? That story went from, oh, this is kind of like, okay, you got a crazy person, to like, ooh. Yeah. Like, yikes, she's actually caring for people. How's your system that broken? Literally.

00:20:32 Wow. Sad. It is. I'm glad she got called. Me too. All right, Morgan. You're up. What's up? Okay. This is not a submitted story, so this is just one. The rest of the stories on this episode are not submitted to us. Okay. All right. So this person says, I'm not sure why this one bothers me more than some of the others. Maybe it was because of where it happened. The property and evidence manager for a Florida police department had one job, maintaining the integrity of everything that moved through that room. Chain of custody, accurate records, nothing in and nothing out without proper documentation. That is the job in its entirety. She had a coordinator that worked directly under her.

00:21:13 From January to August of 2024, the two of them were clocking each other in and out of the system. One would show up or neither would. And then they marked both of them down as having worked full shifts. Over eight months, the manager collected $31,190 in pay that she hadn't earned. Her coordinator collected $5,978. The people whose entire job was keeping accurate records of everything that had passed through the building were falsifying their own records to steal from their employer. An internal investigation eventually caught it. Both were arrested and the manager is facing a second degree grand theft and the coordinator is facing a third degree. What keeps sticking with me is the irony of it. The evidence room at a police department is supposed to be the most documented, most audited, and most rigorously tracked space in the entire building.

00:21:56 And yet, nobody pulled the timesheets for eight months. They weren't stealing drugs. They weren't tampering with cases. They were stealing time. And when you're the person responsible for the integrity of the police department's evidence, that's a very particularly kind of betrayal. Eight months, $37,000, caught the moment someone finally checked the logs. So, explain to me what happened. Like, what was happening? They were stealing time. So, one of them would go in and clock both of them in. Oh. Her and the manager. And then leave. And then just leave. Eight hours shifts. When they were supposed to be in there guarding all the evidence in the room. And then they would clock back out. And then, so they would take turns, like, clocking both of them in and out. And the entirety stole $37,000 of employer time.

00:22:36 But they didn't steal drugs or anything coming in and out. But, obviously, that's supposed to be one of the most guarded and heavily audited places in the police department. Well, I mean, you would hope people with integrity would be running that particular, you know. I think that's probably a pretty common scheme that gets run on people, on organizations that are tracking time and that kind of manner. Yeah, especially, like, if you don't have, like, a computer, like, with a computer system that's tracking their time live. Like, yeah, I feel like that's pretty rough. All right. So, my second story is that number is going to stay with me for a long time. 4,486. That's how many patients she treated at our hospital over 18 months.

00:23:17 She worked at the floor, took vitals, administered medication, and talked to people at their most vulnerable, scared, in pain, trusting the person standing over them in scrubs. She did not have a nursing license. She never had one. What she had was someone else's license number, a real nurse, and a real credential. It was just an identity she borrowed without asking, and she'd use it to get hired. Here's the part that nobody really talks about. She was good at the job. She wasn't leaving patients in danger every shift. By most accounts, she was competent and professional, which is probably why it took 18 months for anyone to catch it. What caught her was a promotion. Someone on our team recommended her for a supervisory role. That triggered a fresh credential review. A coworker pulled her license number to verify her from the new position, and it came back belonging to someone else entirely, a real nurse in a different state.

00:24:04 She was arrested and sentenced to five years probation for practicing nursing without a license. I keep coming back to that number, though. 4,486 people who came in sick or injured or frightened who put their trust in the system that was supposed to make sure the person that was caring for them was actually qualified. We verified the license number, and we just never verified who the license number belonged to. She was good at the job, and she was also never supposed to have it. The only reason we ever found out is because we tried to give her a promotion. Wow. That's kind of crazy. Apparently, the verification was they were just checking to make sure it was an active license and not necessarily doing, you know, identity connection to it. Yeah. Yeah.

00:24:44 That's crazy. All right. I think it's, I mean, it is criminal. Yeah. I mean, it just speaks to my, you know, effective background screening, verification, credentialing, and all that, and some of these roles like this is just so critical. Yeah. And what makes this super hard for folks who work for HR leaders and talent acquisition, because I've worked with, I did a lot of close work with one of the largest hospitals in the country with their talent acquisition team. And it is an absolute pressure cooker. Yeah. Because they have needs to hire people and significant pressure where they have demand, which is sick people who need help.

00:25:33 Yeah. And they need nurses, and they need everything. I mean, and you have these teams who do all this hiring, and the pressure they're under for placement is, it's really, really, really, really a tough job. For sure. And I feel for them. And, you know, to not bend the rules, to not cut a corner, to not do something, skip the process so you can hurry up and get somebody who looks good on paper, you know, is really, really difficult. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and overwhelmingly, every single person I worked with in that one large hospital was incredibly cognizant of how important their role was and how important it was for them to do a good job vetting.

00:26:25 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. All right. So, my last story of the day is, so, in August of 2025, a school district in Harford, is that how you say it? Yeah. Harford County, Maryland, hired a man as a full-time middle school teacher. He had spent 22 years as a school police officer with Baltimore City Public Schools. Solid background, relevant experience, seemed like a reasonable hire. What the district also knew was because it was a public record at the time they made the offer was that in September 2023, the FBI had arrested him and charged him with 15 federal felonies, tax evasion, and collecting $215,000 in fraudulent overtime pay during his time with Baltimore City Public Schools.

00:27:06 He was actively awaiting trial when they hired him. When asked about the hiring decision, the superintendent said he supported it. On October 17, 2025, the teacher pleaded guilty to two felony counts. He faces up to 25 years in prison. On November 12, he resigned. The board president moved quickly after that. New policies, new legislation in the works, and a state delegate drafting a bill to prevent anyone facing certain felony charges from working in Maryland schools until their case is resolved. That legislation wouldn't have been necessary if the superintendent had just said no in August. I understand the pressure school districts face. Teacher shortages are real, and the problem isn't going away, but we need someone in the classroom.

00:27:47 It's not a defense for hiring a person facing 15 federal felonies for stealing from another school district. The students at the middle school spent an entire fall semester being taught by someone with a guilty plea waiting for him in the court, and their parents didn't even know. Most of the staff didn't know either, and the only person who knew was the superintendent. Well, that's not totally true. I think probably some other people knew. You know, certainly whoever did the background checks or something. Oh, yeah. But, you know, the important thing is the superintendent knew. Yeah. Who's the one who should care the most. Schools are in a—so, I mean, if you think about what's happening, right, and you've got to think about the dilemma that puts vulnerable populations in, right?

00:28:31 Mm-hmm. There's all types of protections for consumers in terms of when an arrest record—it's just an arrest record. It doesn't mean you're guilty. In fact, you are not guilty until they prove you. And so you're applying for a job. Technically, you've been arrested and you may be pending trial. You are technically and legally innocent, right? Yeah. So if you run a background check, you can actually see in some places in the country who don't allow it, but in most places you can, you can see an arrest record. And when you're dealing with vulnerable populations, think about this. Presumed—not presumed—innocent, right?

00:29:12 Until— Until proven guilty. And I'm going to put them—it's for a job of the vulnerable population. Yeah. There are some states that actually restrict that arrest from being put on a background screen. Mm-hmm. And I think through that. That means someone can be—someone could be ready to go on trial. They're out on bail. And they've got to work, so they go try to get a job, run a background screen, right? And in this particular state, they make you suppress that information. Yeah. Right? And so it could be going to work in, you know, any number of vulnerable population environments. Could it be going to work for a small business who couldn't afford for you to, you know, steal for them?

00:29:56 Yeah. Maybe you had a history of that. So there is a tremendous difficult place. And there is some guidance the EEOC has provided in terms of, you know, what you must do as a company. But, I mean, wow. I mean, it's a very, very challenging space. Mm-hmm. And you think organizations should have the right to say no? Yeah. You know, like, that might be too much risk. We'd like to know. And in this particular case, they can. And I absolutely fall on the side of the school. Yeah. And children that, you know. But some people would argue that—some people would argue that what does time—what was stealing, time theft, charging, like, overtime,

00:30:36 have to do with the safety of children. That's how some people would argue. Yeah. Right. I'm anxious to hear what people say. Would they want that—would they want somebody with those offenses teaching their kid? Yeah. For sure. That's you. You're up. Me? Yeah. Alrighty. Let's go. I need to fix the way that I'm sitting. Alright. So I work in a supply chain at a hospital, and a few months back, someone on my team flagged something that doesn't add up. We're ordering significantly more of a specific medical device, the kind used in spinal surgeries, than we're actually using.

00:31:19 The numbers are just off, and nobody can explain why. Yeah. We open an investigation. Six months of reviewing records, tracing orders, pulling surveillance footage. What we find is one of our own surgical technicians arriving for her shift with an empty bag and leaving with it full every single shift. She would walk into the supply room, load up her bag with bone graft devices and other high-value medical supplies, and walk straight out of the building. We had hired her, badged her in, given her access to that supply room, and she had been walking out with it piece by piece for the better part of a year. We caught her in December when security intercepted her at the exit. The bag was full, and she was fired on the spot. By the time Investogators finished tracing everything, they found over $427,000 in payments she received from reselling the stolen items to reports in South Carolina.

00:32:11 The total value of everything she'd taken came to approximately $2.5 million. Oh, my gosh. She was charged with second-degree theft, receiving stolen property, distributing prescription drugs, and impersonating a medical supply representative, because that's exactly how she'd been presenting herself to buyers the entire time. She worked for us for the better part of a year. She was professional. She was punctual. She never gave us a reason to look twice. And every single shift, she left with a full bag, and it never once occurred to us to check it. That's crazy. You hear about employee theft all the time, but you think of it like in a retail store. They're back there stealing jeans. Yeah. Yeah, medical.

00:32:51 They work at a grocery store. You don't think about, like... Not, like, bone graft devices and selling it for thousands of dollars. I don't know. Who's buying it, too, off of a seller? Like, I hope not another hospital. She apparently says she... The story said she was impersonating a medical supply representative. That kind of struck me. I was like... Maybe she's going into hospitals and selling them. So she was pretending that she was selling them as a representative. I guess if you want one, I have one in my bag outside. That's crazy. And then she's... But she's not selling them for retail. If I was a buyer at a hospital and she said, here, do you want to buy this? And I said, yeah. And she's like, oh, it's 20 cents on the dollar.

00:33:32 And I would be like, I don't know. Well, definitely not 20 cents on the dollar because she's made 2.5 million. No, no, no. It was worth... She made... They tracked down $427,000 that went to her. Oh, okay. But everything she sold was worth $2,000. Okay. So she was, like, fire selling them on the side. Or maybe that's just what the hospital reports. They can get their insurance. Who buys bone graft? I don't know. That's what I mean. I don't know. I don't know either. It's crazy. All right. What's up? All right. Next one. This one's super short. It's kind of silly. I'm unsure of how true it is. Anyways, let's just go. So I had to fire a janitor on his very first day.

00:34:13 First day flame out. And here's how it happened. Someone, not even him, spilled a cup of coffee on the floor. The kind of small mess that is, you know, the entire reason the janitor exists. Our new janitor looked at the person who spilled it a lot of times with him and screamed at the absolute top of his lungs. And I let him go. What did he scream? Or did he just let out a gutter all scream? Like what? Like a scream of frustration that he had to clean up the coffee on the floor? I don't know. And that's when day one somehow became several weeks. On his way out, he threatened to kill me. And then he started. Wait, should I not say that? He threatened to unalive me. There we go. And then he started showing up outside of our building, just standing there holding a bouquet of flowers.

00:34:58 What the heck? Did you hire Pennywise? Like what is this? I know, for real. The man who hours earlier had threatened my life was now standing outside with flowers every day. Just there. This is a horror movie. We had to call the police more than once. I still don't know what the flowers were supposed to mean. An apology? A threat? A romance I was not aware of being a part of? I genuinely have no idea. What I do know is that the shortest employment in our company's history somehow produced the longest goodbye. One spilled cup of coffee and a man with a bouquet and the police on speed dial. That's crazy. That one sounded like a serial killer type story.

00:35:41 Literally, this is a horror movie waiting to happen. Is this man still alive? We need to check on this man. You think it's true? I wonder if it's true. I don't know how true it is. There's enough irony or like a little twist in there. I don't know. Really? Even if it was made up, it was funny. I could definitely see like some janitor like freaking out on somebody. Yeah. That I can get. First day? It was like early, right? That I can get. Did it say it was day one? Yeah, day one. Yes. Yeah. That's hard to believe. On day one, you're on your absolute best behavior. So imagine how rude this guy could get when he was not on his best behavior. But yeah, that's totally crazy. Come on. Just scream at the top of your lungs at somebody. Yeah. We're smelling their coffee. You know. That's funny.

00:36:24 Anyway. Oh, Lord. Here's my last story of the day. All right. It's not too long. So it's another healthcare story. We've been reading a lot of healthcare stories lately. I think you must have been in your research or been in a healthcare theme. Yeah, I must have been going down like a rabbit hole or something. I don't know. So I manage a team at a healthcare organization and one of my employees had been with us for four years. Stellar record the whole time. Reliable, professional, never gave me a reason to look twice. It's the kind of person you don't worry about. Then one day, a nurse in a completely separate department tries to pull up a patient's record and gets locked out. The record is already open. Someone else has it.

00:37:04 That someone else is my employee. She had been accessing her husband's medical records while he was actively receiving care on a different floor of the same building. We run an audit and she has accessed his records over 50 times. I terminate her immediately. There's no gray area here. This is a clear documented HIPAA violation and the decision makes itself. What I was not prepared for was her response. She genuinely could not understand why she wasn't being given a second chance. She had been a good employee for four years, she said. She said. She wasn't doing anything malicious, she said. She just wanted to know what was going on with her husband. And then she asked me for a reference for other healthcare roles.

00:37:46 I told her I couldn't do that. She didn't understand that either. Four years of doing everything right and then 50 separate decisions to open a record she had no business being in. The fact that it was her husband's didn't make it better. If anything, it made it harder to explain to her why that wasn't the point. Just because you have access to the data doesn't mean that you're authorized to use it. I think that is like a super good lesson. Yeah. Right? And how serious HIPAA is and patient privacy and everything. I mean, don't you feel for her? Because you realize. Yeah. I do. She's not really. She's just worried about her husband. I get it. She's worried about her husband. She's like, it's her husband. But at the same time, it doesn't matter.

00:38:27 She probably has an authorization as one of his people that can see his medical records. Ask to request to see his medical records. But she's using the systems rather than getting them the other way. Yeah. But she had viewed it so many times that it got locked and so nobody else could view the records. You know. That's crazy. Wow. So I don't know. I guess that does show you how important to HIPAA and how serious they take it. Because the lady was just like, oh, this is not even a decision. You're fired. Yeah. So. Really unfortunate. You can think if your husband's in the hospital a lot, clearly he is. Something's wrong. You know, she's just checking on the health of her husband. Yeah. Like, what do they say? What do they think? You know, she's worried. Yeah. Yeah. Then, you know, now she's lost her job and her husband's in the hospital. That's horrible.

00:39:07 That's sad. Right. I can see where she would be wondering, looking for a second chance. Yeah. I'm just loving on my husband. I want to make sure he's okay. It's not a bad hire. It's a sad hire. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. Nice. Welcome back to the sad hire. Yeah. It's like Wimmy Day. Right. Welcome back to the glad hire. Yeah. Welcome back to the... I just want him to be well. Yeah. Me too. Yeah. I appreciate you. That was fun. Yeah. It was a good day today. It was a long one today. What is this, show 41, 42? 42. Yeah. So that's great. Hey, listen, you know, that's it for us today. And thanks for listening to The Bad Hire. You know, please like, subscribe, rate, review, share, whatever you can do to help us grow the show.

00:39:51 And who's listening to it? We'd love to do that. We've, um, show is really, really growing. Congrats to you guys for all the cool work you do and all the stuff you do. But I literally, I think we're in the millions of views a month now. And, um, that's, that's super cool. And, uh, listen, don't forget, submit your stories. We had a lot of submitted stories in the last couple of episodes. Really happy. Become a guest and do a guest segment with us. Tell your own story, uh, on video and we'll get you on the show and react to it and let you tell other people, um, the, the, the story of your bad hire or apparently your bad hires because most of these folks have got a stack of them. Yeah. They're ready to tell. Yeah.

00:40:32 So, uh, don't forget. We want to hear. Yeah. Send it. It's your chance to win $10,000. We want to do that. There's only, I don't know, we're on show 41. So we've got 12 or 13 shows left, you know, so a few weeks, a few months we're down here to the last little bit before we, I think, I think I'm like one month left. Yeah. Yeah. I think August is like the year anniversary of the, of the show. So then we'll, we'll start, we'll start going through them then. So get your submissions in now. And, uh, and we love that. So, uh, to do that, go to the bad hire.com. That's simple enough. Um, submit it. I think everyone finds it pretty painless and, uh, we love your stories. So until next time, we'll see you from the bad hire.

00:41:13 Bye guys. Bye.