Now. This person may well be the single most appalling individual I've ever had the misfortune to work with. He's surely the worst I've ever had work for me.
He's a toxic combination of 1) illiteracy (his daily reports are unreadable, and the thing with these is they're nearly 95% pure boilerplate - you just copy what the go-by says and change the location and date - and he'd been given the go-bys within a week of his hire and shown how to use them. Didn't help; his stuff read like it was written by someone whose English was their third language), 2) obliviousness (which is deadly in his job, which is to be the engineers' eyes and ears on the jobsite, so he is supposed to see, hear, and record everything that happens...), and 3) a bizarre creepy/nasty personality (one of his other coworkers used to refer to him as "school shooter" and remark that if anyone shot up a Safeway or elementary school in his home town we'd know exactly who was responsible...)
He had the annoying habit of disappearing; he lives more than an hour from the central Willamette Valley where his job takes place so it's not like you could drive around and knock on his door. When he'd ghost on e-mails and phone calls and texts? He was unreachable.
You can imagine how well that worked with scheduling.
When the chief engineer told me about this "threat", I replied:
"How could (name of dirtbag) "threaten" to quit? You can "threaten" to quit if you're a critical employee who has skills your employer will find difficult or impossible to replace. If you're a tech and in grossly incompetent one, at that? The only reasonable response to your "threatening" to quit would be a sincere goodbye and wish for success at your next career at Jiffy Lube."
Apparently HR responded just so, and the gomer handed in his two weeks' notice. Good riddance.
I tend to be unsympathetic to the chorus of job-creators whining about how nobody wants to work anymore. No, they want to work just fine. Just not at your shitty job for shitty pay under shitty conditions.
But.
I gotta admit, I've been seeing some pretty goofy hires lately.
Maybe it's my old outfit; I'm not sure their hiring-fu is strong. But I wonder...this guy. The dude who quit before him who wasn't creepy and incompetent but just dumber than a bag of hammers. The other dude whose literacy was even more precarious than this goofball and who quit just ahead of getting canned...
Meanwhile the great people this outfit brings in leave, largely because the work is grim; endless brain-destroyingly dull development construction work, spending hours a day watching dirt move and arguing with people who tell you to believe them and not your lying eyes.
But this guy...wow. That's really special.
I think I'll make sure I go to Oil Can Henry's next time instead.
2 comments:
I suspect guys like the one you describe last as long as they do, because much of the "liquidity" in the job market, i.e. actual competent people who are looking for work, has dried up.
Everybody appears to be getting sick these days. Respiratory infections. Ones which hit harder and whose effects are more protracted than those of seasonal flu. Sometimes people get hit repeatedly: twice, four times, more. A few months ago, I read a tweet by some poor wretch in Great Britain who'd been nailed no less than 6 times. Her T cells were pretty much shot by that time.
Too bad the name of this affliction has become unmentionable, since it was declared to be "over" by Joe Biden a couple of months ago.
If you should find yourself in the Everett area in the next year or so, and you happen to see an elderly codger walking around in a half-face respirator, you probably won't have to think very hard to surmise who he might be.
As I noted in e-mail; a big part of the problem was that the chief engineer refused to listen to those of us who actually worked with this joker. I told the CE flat-out to can him early on; his technical incompetence wasn't obvious but his weird personality was, and I couldn't see him working out. The CE wouldn't hear of it, and finally when the technical issues were inescapable the guy was past the probation period and COULDN'T be fired without an extensive paper trail, "improvement plan", etc.
And the trajectory of COVID matches the last great industrial pandemic. The Spanish influenza returned in the spring of 1919 just as virulent as it had the previous fall...but few U.S. governing bodies made anything like the efforts to contain it they had previously. So pandemics - unless of Black Death magnitude - are "over" when people and governments decide they're "over". We've decided this one is over, despite the obvious fact that it's still here and still kills people.
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