BACK
BAD HIRE
john bruce
Adjustable Annuity hired George Dill in a hurry because they had a sudden
vacancy in their IS department -- one of the managers had quit in a huff. When
George started work there, he got the manager’s desk, but not his rank. The
desk still had the guy’s old files in it, and right on top of the center drawer was
a copy of his resignation letter. They’d made him an offer with a vice president
title, but when he started they pulled the "aw, gee, we're sorry, there's been a
mistake" routine on him and cut him down to a plain manager, which knocked
out the vacation benefits they'd promised him in the offer. George thought he’d
have quit, too, but his sympathy went only so far, since he was going to be
doing the same work, and they hadn’t even hired him as a manager. They’d
knocked the title down to “coordinator," and of course they’d ground the money
down, too.
But after a while, the bosses thought about it and realized that if they cut
out a manager job, that meant one less slot they could put one of their cronies
in – a foot soldier, after all, had to do real work. A manager just had to fit in.
So they created a new manager job to supervise the one they’d downgraded to
coordinator, and they found Dan Vendry to fill it. He didn't know anything about
computers, but he was willing to work for what they’d pay him. Dan was good-
looking. He looked good even in the cheap suits he wore. He sang with a
gospel band on Sundays, and while he was married, he never let that get in
the way with the ladies who admired his singing in the various churches the
band would visit.
They had a special blind spot at Adjustable Annuity. One Senior VP would
call his secretary in to his office several times a day for dictation, in the course
of which he routinely stood up, unzipped his fly, and placed his schwanz on his
desk. The secretary worked for him for several years until she quit, mentioning
the business about the schwanz only in her exit interview. They walked him out
the door the next day. But even after that, there was still something funny
about the place, which may explain why they hired Vendry, and why Vendry
hired Billy Finch.
Soon after he came on board, Dan Vendry decided they needed another body
-- there wasn't that much to do, even with Dan avoiding everything that came
his way and either passing it on to George or ignoring it. Dan knew so little
about the area that his judgment on what he could ignore wasn't good, and
things were always falling through cracks. But he was doing what the higher-
ups liked: he looked good, and, as one of the other managers put it, he "met"
well. That meant he was able to carry a pile of papers into a conference room
with the proper preoccupied look and make knowing grunts at the right
intervals.
Dan's biggest skill was attaching himself to junkets. If anyone was going
out to inspect the remodeling of a new branch, or visit a vendor's office, or
attend some useless conference, Dan was somehow able to get himself invited
along. This also meant that nobody ever knew exactly where he was, and
everyone was used to not seeing him, and that made it easier for his other
hobby, which, as George gradually learned, was taking nooners at a local motel
with some of the women in the office.
But in the midst of all this, Dan found the time to hire Billy Finch. Billy was
straight out of the Marine Corps, and he'd spent much of his time operating
Marine computers in Hawaii. Dan didn't bother to have George sit in on the
interview and ask technical questions, so he never really knew much about his
qualifications. George thought Dan knew as well as George did that there
wasn't much to do, and what there was of it, George was doing. So rather than
lose the staff position, he filled the hiring authority with the first candidate
who came along, just to be sure it wasn’t taken away.
Billy was attractive, in his late twenties, still with his Marine Corps close-
cropped hair, six feet tall, lean and fit, face a little like Elvis Presley. George
thought Dan looked at Billy and saw a younger version of himself. Dan had
been in the Navy, and in fact he was a Viet Nam vet, but from what he told
George, he'd mostly driven a bulldozer, and in the process he ran a sweet little
racket where anyone who needed any actual bulldozer work done had to give
him a case of booze.
So as Billy got settled in, George mostly just heard the usual stories you'd
expect to hear from someone who ran computers for the Marine Corps in
Hawaii, which centered on how little there was to do and what you had to do
to keep from going berserk. And their conversations would be interrupted now
and then by female clerks coming from all over the rest of the building to drop
by Billy's cube and chat him up. First a few, then a lot. It was getting to be a
regular procession. They couldn't leave Billy alone.
Other than that, Billy still didn't have much to do. One day he asked George
if he could leave early. "I’m not used to working more than three or four hours
a day," he said. Maybe he meant it was going to take him a while to work up
to eight, or maybe he figured he’d never have to. He didn't work for George, so
he couldn't tell him yes or no, but George said it would probably help if he
stuck around. In fact, George offered to bring him up to speed on some of his
work, but he wasn't interested. Billy started taking off when he pleased
anyhow.
Meanwhile, other managers began coming to George asking about projects
that were building up on Dan's desk. One guy wanted to buy a new product,
and IS had to bless it. Dan wouldn't have been the guy to know whether it was
good or bad, but he wasn't passing it on to George, and he wasn't getting back
to the other manager. It was just sitting in a pile with everything else he
wasn't getting to. All George could do was mention it to Dan, who was
beginning to have a problem with people's impression that George was doing
all the work.
Dan was getting to work late, but on random days he'd call George at the
office from his cell phone right at starting time to be sure he was there.
George began to make some sense of where Dan was going on his long lunch
breaks, and with whom (though by no means everyone), but he didn't have the
full story until much later. George knew some kind of a problem was going to
build up over Dan not being around and not doing anything -- the only factor
that had kept things from boiling over up to then was that some of the
managers and all the higher-ups still thought Dan looked and acted the part.
Just as George was convinced something was going to have to happen, Dan
himself called a big meeting, maybe two dozen people. The whole thing had an
air of great import. George should have guessed what was going on when, a
few days earlier, he mentioned to Dan something that had to do with Billy, and
Dan got a shifty-eyed expression and evaded whatever it was he'd said.
Billy Finch, they were told in the meeting, was being terminated as they
spoke, and would be walked out the door into the hands of the local police on
charges of sexual battery. The clerks who’d been lining up outside Billy's cube
were going to lunch with him, but the lunches hadn't turned out well. In fact,
what George learned later from scuttlebutt was that Billy would take the clerks
to lunch in his car, but not long after leaving the company's parking lot, he'd
open his pants and say, "You want lunch? There it is!!"
After the meeting, though, whoever had filed charges of sexual battery
against Billy withdrew them, so everyone missed the drama of his arrest,
though Billy stayed fired. Later in the day, a pair of human resources types
went through his cube. They showed George phone and card key records
indicating Billy often came back to the data center late at night and made long
distance phone calls to Hawaii that added up to thousands of dollars.
The upshot of the Billy Finch episode was that any tension that might have
been building up over Dan was nicely dissipated. Any action that was going to
be taken over anyone had been taken for the time being, which proved to be a
good while, and Dan just kept on going on junkets and taking nooners with his
special ladies in the office.
called George a couple of days after he'd been fired, asking if George could
help him out in any way. George had just had a phone call from a headhunter
asking if he knew anyone who'd be interested in a low-level computer job, so
he gave Billy her name and number. She called George later in the day
delighted that he'd sent Billy to her. He made a great first impression; after
all, he’d been in the Marines. He stayed on that job a couple of months, but
then George heard from him again that he was up in the Seattle area doing
something else, and that was the last he knew of him.
When Dan started looking for someone to replace Billy, George sat down
with him and as tactfully as he could, he suggested he sit in on the interviews
for Billy’s replacement. To his surprise, Dan didn’t object at all. “That’s a good
idea,” he said. “I’m sorry I didn’t ask you to do it before we hired Billy.” The
whole Billy flap, George began to see, had made Dan look bad, and Dan didn’t
have anyone to blame for it. But Dan apparently saw that having George
involved might keep him out of trouble.
The first guy they interviewed impressed Dan, but George was able to bring
in his own perspective. “He can’t spell the name of the company he’s working
for,” George said, pointing to his resume.
“What’s wrong with that?” asked Dan. “I didn’t even notice. That’s not how
you spell it?”
“No,” George said. He spelled it the right way.
“Well, that’s not how you pronounce it,” said Dan.
“Look,” George said. “The guy’s been there eight years, and he doesn’t know
how to spell the name of the place he works. He must see the name all the
time. What else do you think he can get wrong?”
Sometimes George woke up in the middle of the night, and if he thought
about it, he could see Dan’s point. There wasn’t anything for the guy to do
anyhow, just as there hadn’t been anything for Billy to do. So why make a big
issue of whether he was qualified or not? Even so, Dan and George had a long
wrangle, and Dan finally agreed to interview someone else. This one was a
lady, and since Dan showed George her resume before they called her in,
George was able to make sure she was at least worth the time to talk to. Her
name was Carla Dinkworth.
She turned out to be well-spoken, and she had the technical skills they
needed, or that they would theoretically have needed if there was enough work
for her to do. In fact, there wasn’t much either George or Dan could say against
her. The only thing that bothered George a little was that at one point, he
asked her a question that might have been a little more technically challenging
than she expected. He could see from her face that she was about to lose her
temper, and lose it badly, but she calmed right down and gave the best answer
she could, which was good enough for George. So they hired her.
Carla moved into Billy’s cube, which was right next to George. They didn’t
have that much to talk about, so George didn’t talk with her as much as he
talked with Billy. But the basic problem didn’t change, which was that there
wasn’t enough work for two people. George offered to train her and give her
some of his work to keep her from going stir crazy, but she wasn’t interested,
and she didn’t work for George – she worked for Dan. And once Dan had hired
her, he seemed to lose interest. He had to fill that slot on his org chart, or he’
d lose it, and if he lost it, they’d ask why they needed him as a manager just
to supervise George.
So for a while, George let things ride over Carla, and on balance, that was a
mistake. There was a moment where George asked himself whether she might
be going off on nooners with Dan, but he dismissed the idea as crazy. She was
married, and she wasn’t that good looking. Anyhow, as far as George could tell,
Dan had his hands full with two or three other ladies in the IS department.
They were married, too, and they weren’t exactly babes, but for some reason
George didn’t put two and two together.
Even so, George sometimes felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck as
if someone in the next cube was listening in on his phone calls. The vice
presidents who sometimes lost patience when Dan wouldn’t get back to them
on their requests would sometimes call George directly to find out what was
happening. It seemed as though Carla could sense when George was getting
that kind of a call, and the back of his neck got very prickly indeed as he tried
to calm the callers down when they’d want to know when Dan would get to
their business.
Right around then, George started to notice that Carla was taping copies of
Heathcliff cartoons to her cube walls. She’d cut the current one out of each day’
s paper, but that apparently wasn’t enough, and she was going on the web and
printing out others. The object seemed to be to cover everything with
Heathcliff cartoons and nothing else. And after that, a stuffed Heathcliff
cartoon cat figure appeared in her cube as a decoration.
And then a week or so after that, Dan called George into his office.
Apparently George had said something Dan didn’t like to one of the vice
presidents who’d kept calling George about the stuff that wasn’t moving off
Dan’s desk. “Did you say, ‘Write your senators and congressmen’ to Bob Selmer
when he asked why I hadn’t gotten back to him?”
“How did you hear that?” George asked him. “Did Bob say anything about it
to you?”
“No,” Dan said. “I was standing near your cube, and I heard you say it.”
George was sure that couldn’t have been the case. When he got that kind of
call, he tended to stand up and look around to see if he could grab Dan and
give him the call to handle himself. But the managers who called George were
bright enough to try to track Dan down themselves. If they called George, it
was as a last resort when they couldn’t find Dan. There was no way Dan could
have been standing around near his cube when George said something like
that. It had to have been Carla passing things on to him.
Not long after that, George had to run an errand on his lunch hour, and he
was driving back to work on a route he hadn’t taken before. He stopped at a
traffic light at Heathcliff Avenue, which was new to him. “Think of that,”
George thought, “a street named after a character in Wuthering Heights.” But
then he thought, “That’s odd. There’s a comic strip called Heathcliff, too.” Then
he turned his head and saw it: the Heathcliff Motel. He suddenly got the point
of all the Heathcliff artifacts in Carla’s cube. That must have been where she
and Dan were taking nooners. He must have shown it in his face somehow
when he got back to the office. Carla was in her cube, and she saw George
come in.
Half an hour later, she popped her head over the partition that separated
their cubes. “I’ve sent you an e-mail,” she said. “I think you should read it
now.” He did. George remembered that everything had been spelled right on
her resume, but you can pay people to take care of that.
George:
I have been observeing you’re conduct here as an employee. You may be
wondering why you’re career here isn’t moving as it should. Well, George I
have some ideas on why. You are constantly running down our manager, Dan,
over the phone. The other day you told someone to Write there senaters &
Congressman. I guess they were complaining about Dan not being around.
Well, Dan is a very busy person. Dan has Confidential things to do that he can’
t tell you about. You are setting you’re self up as a judge and jury over Dan
and telling people to Write there senaters when you don’t know the first thing
about how many things Dan has to do every day. I just thought I would tell
you about this. I have been helping Dan with his many Confidential duties.
Sincerley,
Carla C. Dinkworth
Asst. System Engineer
Adjustable Annuity Corp
Information Systems Division
Mail Location G-46B
22478 Technology Drive
Lemon City, California 91374
c.c.dinkw6@adjustableannuity.com
Well, that made it clear enough as far as George was concerned. She was
making it known she had her own line of communication to Dan, and it looked
like she was going to give both of them all the advice she could. A couple of
days after that, the mainframe crashed right in the middle of the day, and it
took the most important company systems down with it. Dan didn’t have any
real responsibilities where that was concerned, and that was fine, because as
usual, nobody could track him down.
But Carla for some reason decided she should take charge. Somehow a
Senior VP was OK with Carla stomping into his office and taking over his
whiteboard. She took a piece of paper and wrote CRISIS MANAGEMENT CENTER
on it and taped it outside the Senior VP’s door. Then she started writing status
updates on the whiteboard. “12:52 System down. 1:30 No change. 2:05 No
change.” And so forth. She looked very impressed with herself. Maybe Dan had
been saying good things about her to the IS bigwigs.
At that point, though, George began to realize where her interests lay. She
hadn’t been interested in having George train her in the stuff George was
doing. She was after a better job than that, it seemed. And if she was carrying
tales to Dan about his phone conversations as part of their pillow talk, she was
using George as a way to get what she wanted. It was time for George to get
out of there.
As it happened, though, he didn’t have much problem with that. The
headhunter who’d put Billy Finch in his new job was still happy he’d given him
her name, and she was even happier to hear from George when George called
her and asked her if she had anything in his line. She did. It all went very
smoothly, and George gave them notice a couple of weeks later. As usual,
nobody could find Dan, so George gave Dan’s boss his resignation letter. They
found Dan soon enough after that. The human resources people gave George a
check for the next two weeks and walked him out the door that afternoon. He’d
just have sat around bad-mouthing Dan for the next two weeks anyhow.
His phone was ringing when he got home. It was Carla. She had his number,
because it was on the emergency call list. “Why’d you quit?” she asked. “They
were going to promote you.”
Right, George thought. And Carla was going to help. “That’s OK,” George
said, “I got a good raise to go to the new place.” And it was true. He’d make
more there than anything Adjustable Annuity would give him as a raise, but he
wasn’t sure how Carla knew about any promotion.
Not too long after that, he was eating lunch one day at a food court near his
new place. One of the Adjustable Annuity auditors happened to be there. He
recognized George and came over to his table. He didn’t say anything at first,
just gave George a look that said he knew who George was. He pulled out a
chair at his table and sat down.
“So how much have you heard?” he asked George. He was one of those
auditors who thought he worked for the FBI, very need-to-know.
“About what?”
The auditor gave a shifty-eyed look over his shoulder. “About Dan,” he said in
a lowered voice. Actually, George hadn’t heard anything. He didn’t really care
that much. “They walked him out the door,” he went on.
“What happened?”
“Seems like Carla didn’t know about the other ladies Dan was taking to the
motel at lunch time. Dan kept telling her he was going to get promoted, and
when that happened, he’d promote her, too, and he’d fix it so you worked for
her. She was after your job. But then she found out about one of the other
ladies he was taking to the motel. She began to think maybe Dan didn’t mean
it about promoting her. So she thought it over, and she figured the best thing
to do would be to call Dan’s wife and tell her all about what was going on.”
“Oh my god,” George said. “What happened then?”
“So Dan’s wife got pretty upset herself, and she turned around and called
the senior VP over at IS and complained that nobody’d stopped her husband
from doing all this stuff.”
“And they walked Dan out the door,” George said.
“Not without an investigation,” he replied, giving George a look. George
could figure that one out, and George pretty much knew who’d done the
investigating. “But that’s not all. They couldn’t fire Carla yet. But they had to
replace Dan.”
“Who’d they get?”
“Al.” Al was another of the auditors. In fact, Al was something of a hard
case.
“So Al’s job was to get rid of Carla.”
“Didn’t take him all that long.”
“I can’t imagine it would. She never wanted to do the work.”
“And she didn’t.”
“So she’s gone, too.”
“Yup.”
“Ever hear what happened to her?”
“Al followed up. He was pretty mad, she got a job right away almost across
the street.” But then, saying nothing more, the auditor got up and left.
Then George ran into Dan at a conference. Typical of Dan, the conference didn't
have anything to do with the work he was doing, but he'd been able to use it
to get out of the office. After that, he and George would run into each other
every few months at conferences, and they always got along well -- Dan was a
charming, attractive guy. Now and then George would call and touch base with
him, but suddenly he wasn't there at the new place he was working, and his
home phone had been disconnected, too. George figured he’d gotten in trouble
for nooners once too often, and his wife took him off someplace where she
could keep an eye on him, or maybe just thought she could.
Carla left the job she got after Al fired her, so she’s been working in IS
departments all over the area, too. George never heard any more from Billy
Finch.
Even after they lost touch, George would sometimes think about running
into Dan again, hoping that maybe, however briefly, Dan could fool him again
into thinking things weren’t the way they are.
(c) 2008 by John Bruce